Class . i il 



(Sf 



LECTURES 



ON 



ENGLISH LITERATURE, 



By IIENRY REED 



FIFTH COITION, REVISED AND CORRECTED. 



PHILADELPHIA: 

J. B. LIPPINCOTT & GO. 
1867. 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1855, by 
WILLIAM B. REED, 

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Eastern 
District of Pennsylvania. 



COLLINS, PRINTER. 



TO 

Its KSftotaefr Sister, 

WHO, FOR THE SAKE OP THE LIVING, HAS NOBLY BORNE HER SORROW 
FOR THE DEAD, 

18 AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBfft. 

W. B. R 



CONTENTS. 



Introductory Notice Page XT 

LECTURE L — INTRODUCTORY. 

PRINCIPLES OP LITERATURE. 

Object, to assist and guide students — Necessity of systematic study 
— Judicious criticism — True aims and principles of literature- 
Choice of books — Its difficulties — Aim of this course of lectures 
to remove them — All books not literature — Accurate definition 
of literature — Its universality — Izaak Walton — Addison — 
Charles Lamb — Lord Bacon — Clarendon — Arnold — Spenser and 
Shakspeare — Southey and Wordsworth — Belles-lettres not li- 
terature — Literature not an easy, patrician pleasure — Its danger 
as to practical life — Its influence on character — De Quincey's 
definition — Knowledge and power — Influence on female charac- 
ter — True position of woman — Tennyson's Princess — Novel- 
reading — Taste, an incorrect term — Henry Taylor — Cowper — 
Miss Wordsworth — Coleridge's philosophy 25 

LECTURE II. 

APPLICATION OP LITERARY PRINCIPLES. 

Narrow and exclusive lines of reading to be avoided — Catholicity 
of taste — Charles Lamb's idea of books — Ruskin — Habits of 
reading comprehensive — Ancient Literature— Foreign Lan- 
guages — Different eras of letters — English essay-writing — 
Macaulay — Southey — Scott and Washington Irving — Archdea- 
con Hare — Lord Bacon's Essays — Poetic taste — Influence of 



CONTENTS. 



individual pursuits — Friends in Council — Serious and gay books 
— English humour — Southey's ballad — Necessity of intellectual 
discipline — Disadvantage of courses of reading — Books not 
insulated things — Authors who guide — Southey's Doctor — Elia 
— Coleridge — Divisions of Prose and Poetry — Henry Taylor's 
Notes from Books— Poetry not a mere luxury of the mind — 
Arnold's habits of study and taste — The practical and poetical 
element of Anglo-Saxon character — The Bible — Mosaic Poetry 
- — Inadequacy of language — Lockhart's character of Scott — Ar- 
nold's character of Scipio — Tragic poetry — Poetry for children 
— Robinson Crusoe and the Arabian Nights — Wordsworth's Odo 
k> Duty — Character of Washington Page 54 

LECTURE III. 

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 

Medium of ideas often forgotten — Witchery of English words — 
Analysis of good style difficult — The power of words — Our duty 
to the English language — Lord Bacon's idea of Latin — Milton — 
Hume's expostulation with Gibbon — Daniel's Lament — Extei* 
sion of English language — French dominion in America — Lan- 
der's Penn and Peterborough — Duty of protecting aud guarding 
language — Degeneracy of language and morals — Age of Charles 
II. — Language part of character — Arnold's Lectures on Modern 
History — Use of disproportionate words — Origin of the English 
language in the North — Classical and romantic languages — 
Saxon element of our language — Its superiority — The Bible 
idiom — Structure of sentences — Prepositions at the end of most 
vigorous sentences — Composite sentences, and the Latin element 
— Alliteration — Grandeur of sentences in old writers — Modern 
short sentences — Junius — Macaulay — No peculiar poetic diction 
— Doctor Franklin's rules — Shakspeare's matchless words — 
Wordsworth's sonnet — Byron — Landor — Coleridge's Christabel 
—"The Song in the Mind "—Hood— The Bridge of Sighs 85 

LECTURE IV. 

EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

Early English prose and poetry — Sir John Mandeville — Sir Tho- 
mas More's Life of Edward the Fifth — Chaucer's Tales — At- 



COiN TENTS. 



tempted paraphrases — Chaucer Modernized — Conflict of Nor- 
man and Saxon elements — Gower — Reign of Edward the Third — 
Continental wars — Petrarch — Boccacio — Froissart — The church 
— Wyclif — Arts and Architecture — Statutes in English — Chau- 
cer resumed — His humour and pathos — Sense of natural beauty 
— The Temple of Fame — Chaucer and Mr. Babhage — The flower 
and the leaf — Canterbury Tales — Chaucer's high moral tone — 
Wordsworth's stanza — Poet's corner and Chaucer's tomb — The 
death of a Language — English minstrelsy — Percy's Reliques 
— Sir Walter Scott — Wilson — Christian hymns and chaunts — 
Conversion of King Edwin — Martial ballads — Lockhart — 
Spanish ballads — Ticknor's great work — Edom of Gordon — 
Dramatic power of the ballad — The Two Brothers — Contrast of 
early and late English poetry Page 121 

LECTURE V. 

LITERATURE OP THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 

Pawn of letters a false illustration — Intellectual gloom from Ed- 
ward III. to Henry VIII. — Chaucer to Spenser — Caxton and 
the art of printing — Civil wars — Wyatt and Surrey — The son- 
net naturalized in English poetry — Blank verse — Henry VIII. 
— Edward VI. — Landor's Sonnet — Sternhold and Hopkins — 
Bishop Latimer — Goodwin Sands and Tenterden Steeple — 
"Bloody Mary "— Sackville— " The Mirror of Magistrates"— 
His career — Age of Elizabeth — Contrasts of her life — The 
Church as an independent English power — Shakspeare — His 
journey to London — Final formation of the English language 
— "The well of English undefiled" — The Reformation — Sir 
Philip Sydney — The Bishop's Bible — Richard Hooker — Spen- 
ser and Shakspeare — Wilson's Criticism — Sir Walter Raleigh 
— Shakspeare's Prose 155 

LECTURE VI. 

LITERATURE OP THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY, WITH INCIDENTAL 

SUGGESTIONS ON SUNDAY READING. 

Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity — Progress of English literature — 
Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World — Bacon's Essays — 
Milton — Comus — Hymn on the Nativity — Suggestions as to 



CONTENTS. 



Sunday reading — Sacred books — Forms of Christian faith- 
Evidences of Religion — Butler's Analogy — Charles Lamb's Re- 
marks on Stackhouse — History of the Bible — Jeremy Taylor — 
Holy Living and Dying — Life of Christ — Pulpit-oratory — Sou- 
they's Book of the Church — Thomas Fuller — Wordsworth's 
Ecclesiastical Sonnets— Izaak "Walton's Lives — Pilgrim's Pro- 
gress — The Old Man's Home — George Herbert— Henry Vaughan 
— Milton resumed — Paradise Lost — Criticism on it as a purely 
sacred poem — Shakspeare's mode of treating sacred subjects — 
Spenser — The Faery Queen — John Wesley — Keble's Christian 
Year — George Wither — Aubrey De Vere — Trench's Sonnet. Page 184 

LECTURE VIL 

LITERATURE OF THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES. 

Milton's old age — Donne's Sermons — No great school of poetry 
without love of nature — Blank in this respect between Paradise 
Lost and Thomson's Seasons — Court of Charles the Second — 
Samson Agonistes — Milton's Sonnets — Clarendon's History of 
the Rebellion — Pilgrim's Progress — Dryden's Odes — Absalom 
and Achitophel — Rhyming tragedies — Age of Queen Anne — 
British Statesmen — Essayists — Tatler — Spectator — Sir Roger 
De Coverley — Pope — Lord Bolingbroke — English Infidels — 
Johnson's Dictionary — Gray — Collins — Cowper — Goldsmith — 
The Vicar of Wakefield — Cowper — Elizabeth Browning 215 

LECTURE VIII. 

LITERATURE OP THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

Literature of our own times— Influence of political and social re- 
lations — The historic relations of literature — The French Revo- 
lution, and its effects — Infidelity — Thirty years' Peace — Scien- 
tific progress coincident with letters — History — Its altered tone 
— Arnold — Prescott — Niebuhr — Gibbon — Hume — Robertson- 
Religious element in historical style — Lord Mahon — Macaulay's 
History — Historical romance — Waverley Novels — The pulpit — 
Sydney Smith — Manning — Poetry of the early part of the cen- 
tury — Bowles and Rogers — Campbell — Coleridge's Christabel — 
Lay of the Last Minstrel—Scott's poetry , 248 



CONTENTS. 



xiU 



LECTURE IX. 

CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE. 

Lord Byron — His popularity and its decline — His power of sim- 
ple, vigorous language — Childe Harold — The Dying Gladiator 
—The Isles of Greece — Contrast of Byron's and Shakspeare's 
creations — Miss Barrett — Miss Kemble's sonnet — Byron as a 
poet of nature — His antagonism to Divine truth — The Dream, 
the most faultless of his poems — Don Juan — Shelley — Leigh 
Hunt's remarks on — Carlyle — His earnestness — Southey — 
His historical works — Thalaba — Wordsworth — His character- 
istics — Female authors — Joanna Baillie — Miss Edgeworth — 
Mrs. Kemble — Mrs. Norton — Miss Barrett — Cry of the Chil- 
dren, <fcc Page 272 

LECTURE X. 

TRAGIC AND ELEGIAC POETRY. 

Contrast of subjects, serious and gay — Tragic poetry — Dlustrated in 
history — Death of the first-born — Clarendon's raising the stand- 
ard at Nottingham — Moral use of tragic poetry — Allston's cri- 
ticism — Elegiac poetry — Its power not mere sentimentalism — 
Gray's Elegy, an universal poem — Philip Van Artevelde — Caro- 
line Bowles — "Pauper's Death Bed" — Wordsworth's Elegies — 
Milton's Lycidas — Adonais — In Memoriam — Shelley's Poem on 
Death of Keats — Tennyson — In Memoriam reviewed 309 

LECTURE XL 

LITERATURE OF WIT AND HUMOUR. 

Subtilty of these emotions — Sydney Smith and Leigh Hunt — 
Dullness of jest-books — Hudibras a tedious book — Sydney 
Smith's idea of the study of wit — Charles Lamb — Incapacity 
for a jest — German note on Knickerbocker — Stoicism and Pu- 
ritanism — Guesses at Truth — Cheerful literature needed for 
thoughtful minds — Recreative power of books — Different modes 
of mental relaxation — Napoleon — Shelley — Cowper — Southey's 
merriness — Doctor Arnold — Shakspeare and Scott's humour — 
The Antiquary — Burke — Barrow's definition of wit — Hobbes— 



CONTENTS. 



Forms of Humour — Doctor Johnson's grotesque definitions — 
Collins the landscape painter — Examples of grotesque style — 
Irish Bulls — Rip Van Winkle — Sydney Smith and Doctor Parr 
— Humour in old tragedies — Lear and the fool — Hamlet and 
the grave-digger — Irony — Macbeth and the doctor — Anne Bo- 
leyn — Bishop Latimer — Fuller — Dean Swift and Arbuthnot — 
Gulliver- — Sir Roger De Coverley — Charles Lamb — Swift and 
Byron's humour — Prostitution of wit — Sir Robert Walpole — 
Lord Melbourne — Hogarth — Danger of power of humour illus- 
trated — Ruskin's criticism Page 337 



LECTURE XII. 

THE LITERATURE OF LETTER- WRITING. 

Characteristics of a true letter — Historical and familiar letters — 
Lord Bacon — Dr. Arnold's remarks — Despatches of Marlbo- 
rough — Nelson — Franklin — John Adams — Reception by George 
III. — Washington's correspondence — Bishop White's anecdote 
of Washington — American diplomatic correspondence — Lord 
Chatham's Letters — Duke of Wellington's — Archdeacon Hare's 
remarks on — General Taylor's official letters — Familiar letters 
— Cowley — Impropriety of publishing private correspondence 
— Arbuthnot and Johnson's remarks on — Burns's Letters — Ten- 
nyson — Howell's Letters — The Paston Letters — Lady Russell's 
— Pope's — Hartley Coleridge's remark — Chesterfield — Horace 
Walpole — Swift and Gray's — Cowper's — Scott's — Byron's — 
Southey's, and Lamb's Letters of Dedication — Lamb's, to his 
Bister , 376 



INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. 



My duty in editing this volume is a very simple one: — to 
state, with frankness and precision, the circumstances of its 
publication, and, if need be, to disarm criticism by the 
absence of any thing like pretension on the part of nim 
whose posthumous work is now given to the reading world 
of his own countrymen. Immediately on my brother's 
death in the autumn of last year, or as soon (and with me 
it was very soon) as all hope of possible rescue had faded 
away, my attention was turned to his manuscript lectures, 
delivered in different courses at the University of Pennsyl- 
vania. I knew that, as popular lectures, or rather essays at 
lectures, they had been very successful, and I hoped and 
believed they would bear the severer test of being printed. 
This, I was well aware, is not always the case; and I 
examined these manuscripts with the idea of possible inap- 
titude clearly in my mind. The result, however, was a con- 
viction that the Lectures, or a portion of them, ought to be 
published. They contain, aside from their value as works 
of criticism, developments of the pure taste and gentle feel- 
ing of the author, which will interest, at least his friends, 
and be appreciated by all who value them exactly for what 

they were designed — not profound disquisitions, but popular 

xv 



XTi 



INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. 



lectures. In saying this, I must be understood as speaking 
with precision, and not in words either of real or affected 
disparagement. I wish to describe them as He would do, 
were he alive to speak of his own modest work. There will 
be found on these pages, if I mistake not, hints and sugges- 
tions of philosophic criticism floating on the surface (or 
hidden not far beneath) of a most graceful and attractive 
current of thought and language. 

It will be farther borne in mind that these Lectures are 
printed exactly as written, with scarcely a verbal altera- 
tion, and no change or modification of opinion. He wrote 
from a full mind, often with great rapidity, and without the 
opportunity or the necessity of revision. Knowing this to 
be his habit of composition, and that he never prepared 
himself specially for any one lecture, I have been much 
struck with the proof they afford of his long and habitual 
studiousness and rich and accomplished scholarship. His 
citations of authorities, or rather quotations, are purely 
incidental; and one of my duties has been to trace his 
studies to their sources, and, as far as possible, verify, by 
exact reference, the citations he has made. In this — for 
my own occupations have forced my ordinary reading into 
other channels— I have been aided by the only survivor 
(one still nearer to him than myself) to whom, before 
delivery and as he wrote them, he read these Lectures; and 
also by his and my friends, — to whom I am glad thus to 
make my acknowledgments, — Mr. George W. Hunter, Mr. 
Ellis Yarnall, and Mr. William Arthur Jackson. 

In selecting this course of Lectures, I was guided by two 



INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. 



considerations, — one that it was a more complete and con- 
tinuous course than others ; another, that it was among the 
last delivered by him. The dates will be found noted in 
each lecture. 

I have ventured not only to put, in the form of notes, some 
unconnected remarks by the author himself and marked 
with his initials, but to add a few of my own. These are 
very few, and are meant to be illustrative. Perhaps, in the 
analysis of my feelings, there may be another pardonable 
motive, in an affectionate desire, not diminishing, but grow- 
ing with every hour of desolate separation, of connecting 
some work of mine with his. Now that it is done, I feel as 
if a mournful pleasure were over, and I was parting anew 
from him. 

Should this volume be received with interest and favour, 
it is my wish to complete the series by two other courses 
on kindred subjects: 

1. Lectures on Modern History down to the Period of the 
Eeformation; and 

2. Lectures on the History of England, as illustrated by 
Shakspeare's Historical Dramas. 

If, then, (for I am dealing very candidly with the public,) 
sufficient interest be felt in the intellectual and moral 
developments of these volumes to justify such a tribute to 
his memory, I may venture — at least, this now is my pur- 
pose — to prepare a Memoir of my brother's gentle and tran- 
quil life, and very interesting correspondence on both sides 
of the Atlantic. The life of a secluded American scholar 

may not be without interest to those near and at a distance. 

2* 



xviii 



INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. 



With this hope clearly before me, and dreading, from 
observation in other cases, the effect of a preliminary 
memoir which affection so naturally exaggerates, I shall 
now simply note a few dates and incidents, by way of ex- 
planatory introduction, of his quiet life. 

Henry Reed was born in Philadelphia on the 11th of 
July, 1808. He was christened by the name of Henry 
Hope, though the middle name was afterwards dropped. 
His early education was at the classical school, of high 
repute in its day, of Mr. James Ross. Here began a friend- 
ship, which lasted through life and survived in earnest 
sorrow for his premature death, with Mr. Horace Binney, 
(the younger,) whose name I venture to refer to in simple 
justice to the living and the dead, to us who grieve and 
to him for whom we mourn. This friendship was faithful 
and affectionate to the end. 

Mr. Reed entered the Sophomore class at the University 
of Pennsylvania in September, 1822, and was graduated as 
Bachelor of Arts in 1825. He began the study of the law 
under the general guidance of Mr. Sergeant, then at the 
heighth of his professional fame, and was admitted to 
practice in the District Court of the City and County of 
Philadelphia in 1829. 

In September, 1831, he relinquished the practice of his 
profession, and was elected Assistant Professor of English 
Literature in the University. In November of the same 
year, he was chosen Assistant Professor of Moral Philoso- 
phy. In the service of the College he continued for twenty- 
three years, faithful, I am sure I may say, to his duties, 



INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. xts 

however irksome; and never in all that period, until his 
visit to Europe, absent for any length of time from his post, 
except when compelled hj sickness. In 1835, he was 
elected Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature. 

Mr. Heed was married, in 1834, to Elizabeth White Bron- 
son, who, with three children, now survives him. 

It had long been his wish to visit Europe, but his profes- 
sional duties and other claims had always prevented it. In 
the spring of 1854, the Professorship of Moral Philosophy, 
which he had once filled as Assistant Professor, being 
vacant, Mr. Eeed became a candidate for the chair, but was 
not elected. Although no personal disparagement was 
intended, so earnest and so reasonable was his ambition 
for what he considered a high academical distinction, that 
his disappointment was most keen and depressing. His 
secluded mode of life, exempt from the world's rough com- 
petitions; his modest wishes; his consciousness of services 
rendered and duties performed; his natural pride in the 
affection of his students ; and, above all, his conviction that 
moral science, in its highest and holiest sense, as elevated 
by religious truth, was a department of education which he 
was peculiarly competent to take charge of, combined to 
render the disappointment very poignant. His friends and 
family never saw him more depressed. I certainly never 
saw him so deeply wounded. He asked for leave of absence, 
which was granted by the Trustees; and early in May, 
1854, accompanied by his sister-in-law, Miss Bronson, he 
sailed for Europe. 

No American, visiting the Old "World as a private citizen, 



INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. 



ever received a kinder or more discriminating welcome. 
The last months of his life were pure sunshine. Before 
he landed in England, his friends, the family of Dr. Arnold, 
whom he had only known by correspondence, came on 
board the ship to receive him; and his earliest and latest 
hours of European sojourn were passed under the roof of 
the great Poet whose memory he most revered, and whose 
writings had interwoven themselves with his intellectual 
and moral being. " I do not know," he said in one of 
his letters to his family, 1 i what I have ever done to deserve 
all this kindness." And so it was throughout. In England 
he was at home in every sense; and scenes, which to the 
eye were strange, seemed familiar by association and study. 
His letters to America were expressions of grateful delight 
at what he saw and heard in the land of his forefathers, and 
at the respectful kindness with which he was everywhere 
greeted ; and yet of earnest and loyal yearning to the land 
of his birth — his home and family and friends. It is no 
violation of good taste here to enumerate some of the friends 
for whose kind welcome Mr. Reed was so much indebted ; I 
may mention the Wordsworths, Southeys, Coleridges, and 
Arnolds, Lord Mahon, Mr. Baring, Mr. Aubrey De Yere, 
Mr. Babbage, Mr. Henry Taylor, and Mr. Thackeray — 
names, one and all, associated with the highest literary 
or political distinction. 

He visited the Continent, and went, by the ordinary route, 
through France and Switzerland, as far south as Milan and 
Venice, returning by the Tyrol to Inspruck and Munich, 
ana thence down the Rhine to Holland. But his last 



INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. 



xxi 



associations were with the cloisters of Canterbury, (that spot, 
to my eye, of matchless beauty,) the garden vales of Devon- 
shire, the valley of the Wye, and the glades of Rydal. His 
latest memory of this earth was of beautiful England in her 
summer garb of verdure. The last words he ever wrote 
were in a letter of the 20th September to his venerable 
friend, Mrs. Wordsworth, thanking her and his English 
friends generally for all she and they had done for him. 
The rest is soon told. 

On the 20th of September, 1854, Mr. Reed, with his sister 
embarked at Liverpool for New York, in the United States 
steam-ship Arctic. Seven days afterward, at noon, on the 
27th, when almost in sight of his native land, a fatal 
collision occurred, and before sun-down, every human 
being left upon the ship had sunk under the waves of the 
ocean. The only survivor who was personally acquainted 
with my brother, saw him about two o'clock p.m.; after the 
collision, and not very long before the ship sank, sitting, 
with his sister, in the small passage aft of the dining 
saloon. " They were tranquil and silent, though their 
faces wore the look of painful anxiety." They probably 
afterwards left this position, and repaired to the prome- 
nade deck. For a selfish struggle for life, with a helpless 
companion dependent upon him, with a physical frame 
unsuited for such a strife, and, above all, with a sentiment 
of religious resignation which taught him in that hour of 
agony, even with the memory of his wife and children 
thronging in his mind, to bow his head in submission to the 
will of God, — for such a struggle he was wholly unsuited; 



xxii 



INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. 



and his is the praise, that he perished with the women and 
children. 

Nor can I conclude this brief narrative without the utter- 
ance of an opinion, expressed in no asperity, and not, I 
hope, improperly intruded here — my opinion, as an American 
citizen, that, in all the history of wanton and unnecessary 
shipwreck, no greater scandal to the science of navigation, or 
to the system of marine discipline, ever occurred than the 
loss of the Arctic and her three hundred passengers. There 
is but one thing worse, and that is the absence of all laws 
of the United States either to prevent the recurrence of 
such a catastrophe ; to bring to j ustice those, if there are 
any such, who are responsible; or, at least, to secure a 
judicial investigation of the actual facts. 

The news of Mr. Reed's death was received with deep and 
intense feeling in the city of his birth, his education, and 
active life. Philadelphia mourned sincerely for her son; 
and no tribute to his memory, no graceful expression or act 
of sympathy to his family, was withheld. For them all 
there are no adequate words of gratitude. 

Returning with renewed health and refreshed spirits, 
with a capacity not only for intellectual enjoyment, but 
professional usefulness, enlarged by observation of other 
institutions and intercourse with the wise and good of the 
Mother country, especially those who had made education 
in its highest branches the study and business of their 
lives, Professor Reed, we may well believe, would have 
resumed his American duties with new zeal and efficiency. 
Not that I for one moment imagine he had become in- 



INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. 



xxiil 



fected with the folly of fancying that a system of foreign 
University education, in any of its forms, could or ought 
to be transplanted here; but, I have no doubt, that obser- 
vation of thorough training and accurate scholarship, the 
combination of moral and intellectual discipline such as 
is seen abroad, and especially in Great Britain, would 
have raised still higher in his mind the aims at which 
American students and American institutions of learning 
should be directed. 

By his early death — for he was but forty-six years of age 
— all these hopes were doomed to disappointment. The 
most that can now be done is to give to the world these 
fragmentary memorials of his studious life; and for them I 
beg an indulgent and candid criticism. 

William B. Reed. 

Philadelphia, February 1st, 1865. 



For many days our eyes have seaward wander'd, 
As if to search the Ocean o'er and o'er, 

The while our hearts have sorrowfully ponder'd, 
"Shall we behold his gentle face no more V* 

The silent Sea no glad response returning, 

We cry, " Sun ! that lightest nature's face, 
Dost thou not shine upon some favour' d place 

"Where he is tost for whom our souls are yearning?" 
No answering voice allays our trembling fears, 
And long anxiety gives way to tears. 

Beneath the waves o'er which great ships go flitting, 
He waits the day when Ocean yields her dead ; 
And loving sighs and bitter drops are shed 

By 4esolate ones around his hearthstone sitting ; 
And, while they mourn the gifted and the good, 
The general grief shows holy brotherhood. 



LECTURES 

ON 

ENGLISH LITERATURE. 



LECTURE L— INTRODUCTORY * 

principles of literature. 

Object, to assist and guide students — Necessity of systematic study- 
Judicious criticism — True aims and principles of literature — Choice 
of books — Its difficulties — Aim of this course of lectures to remove 
them — All books not literature — Accurate definition of literature- 
Its universality — Izaak Walton — Addison — Charles Lamb — Lord 
Bacon — Clarendon — Arnold — Spenser and Shakspeare — Southey 
and Wordsworth — Belles-lettres not literature — Literature not an 
easy, patrician pleasure — Its danger as to practical life — Its influ- 
ence on character — De Quincey's definition — Knowledge and Power 
— Influence on female character — True position of woman — Tenny- 
son's Princess — Novel-reading — Taste, an incorrect term — Henry 
Taylor — Cowper — Miss Wordsworth — Coleridge's philosophy. 

This course of lectures is prepared in the hope of doing 
some service in connection with the abundant and pre- 
cious literature which lies about us in our English speech. 
The plan has been, in some measure, prompted to my 
thoughts by applications not unfrequently made to me for 
advice and guidance in English reading. There is a stage 



* Delivered in the Chapel Hall of the University, January 3, 1850. 

3 25 



26 



LECTURE FIRST. 



in mental culture when counsel seems to be intended to 
take the place of exact tuition, and when, looking alto- 
gether beyond the period and the province of what is 
usually called "education," hints and suggestions, criticism, 
literary sympathies, and even literary antagonism, become 
the more expanded and freer discipline, which lasts through 
life. We cannot tell how much of good we may thus 
do to one another. We cannot measure the value of 
unstudied and almost casual influences. A random word 
of genuine admiration may prove a guide into some re- 
gion of literature where the mind shall dwell with satis- 
faction and delight for years to come. But there is a 
demand for something more systematic than such chance 
culture as I have alluded to ; and the mind that craves 
such knowledge of the literature of his own language as 
will make it part of his thoughts and feelings, has a 
claim for guidance and counsel upon those whose duty it 
is to fit themselves to bestow it. It is a claim that well 
may win a quick and kindly response, for the sense of de- 
light is deepened the wider it is spread, or when it opens 
the souls of others to share in its own enjoyment. 

There is perhaps no one, to whom the intercourse with 
books has grown to be happy and habitual, who cannot 
recall the time when, needing other counsel than his own 
mind could give, he felt some guidance that was strength 
to him. One can recall, in after years, how it was, that an 
interest was first awakened in some book — how sympathy 
with an author's mind was earliest stirred— how senti- 
ments of admiration and of love had their first motion in 
our souls toward the souls of the great poets. We may 
perhaps remember, too, how the chastening influence of 
wise and genial criticism may have won our spirits away 



PRINCIPLES OF LITERATURE. 



from some malignant fascination that fastened on the 
unripe intellect only to abuse it. But these kindly and 
healthful agencies exist not alone in the memory — grate- 
fully retained as benefits received in the period of in- 
tellectual immaturity and inexperience. Even the stu- 
dent of literature whose range of reading is most com- 
prehensive — whose habit of reading is most confirmed 
— whose culture is most complete — will tell you that 
it is still in his daily experience to find his choice of 
books not an arbitrary and lawless choosing, but a process 
open to the influences of sound and congenial criticism ; 
he will tell how, by such influences, the activity of his 
thoughts is quickened — how his judgment of books is 
often the joint product of his own reflections, and the 
contact of the wisdom and experience of others. To him 
who wanders at will through the vast spaces of literature, 
with the sorry guidance of good intentions and inexpe- 
rience, most needful are the helping hand and the pointing 
finger; to him who has travelled long in that same do- 
main, pursuing his way with purposes better defined, and 
who has gained a wider prospect and farther-reaching 
views — even by him, guidance, if not so needful, still may 
be welcomed from some fellow-traveller. We marvel 
often at finding how, under the light of wise criticism, 
new powers and new beauties are made visible to our 
minds in books the most familiar. 

I have thus alluded, at the outset, to the importance 
of the guidance which we may receive in our intercourse 
with the world of books, assuming at the same time that 
there is no call upon me to dwell upon the value of that 
intercourse itself. I take for granted that there is no 
one, even am^ng those least conversant with books, whc 



28 



LECTURE FIRST. 



could deny the value of an intelligent habit of reading 
I need not occupy a moment of either your time or mine 
in discussing any such question as that. It is, however 
proper to consider, by way of introduction, some of those 
aims and principles of literature which, though least 
generally appreciated, give it its highest value— noticing, 
in the first place, some of the difficulties which present, 
themselves to a mind willing, at least, if not zealous, for 
such culture. 

The first inquiry that presents itself is, " What books 
does it behoove me to know ?" The docile question is, 
" What am I to read ?" A world of volumes is before 
us. Poetry, science, history, biography, fiction, the mul- 
tiform divisions of miscellaneous literature, each and all 
rise up in their vast proportions to assert their claims. 
Secular literature, in its various departments, and sacred 
literature, casting its lights into the life beyond, both are 
at hand with the boundless exuberance of their stores. 
There is the great multitude of books in our own Eng- 
lish words ; there is the host as large, which, in the kin- 
dred dialects of the North, the mind of Germany has 
given to mankind. The literature of France and of 
Italy, of Spain, the South of Europe, have their re- 
spective claims and attractions. Besides the modern 
mind, there is all that, venerable with the age of thou- 
sands of years, has come down to us from Greece, and 
Home, and Palestine. Then, too, in the whole extent 
of modern literature, there is the daily addition of the 
illimitable issues from the press in our day : so that 
when the student's thoughts turn to the accumulation 
of the printed thoughts of past ages, and to the never- 
ending and superadded accumulation which is poured 



PKIXCI1 LES 



»>F LITERATURE. 



29 



forth from day to day, and from year to year ; and when 
these vast stores are seen to have been made part of the 
scholarship of men and become a portion of their intel- 
lectual and moral nature, one is appalled at the first ap- 
proach, and may shrink from all effort, in despondency or 
hopelessness. It is a bewildering thing to stand in the 
presence of a vast concourse of books — in the midst of 
them, but feeble, or uncertain, or helpless in the using of 
them. It is sad to know that in each one of these vo- 
lumes there is a spiritual power which might stir some 
kindred power in our own souls, which might guide, and 
inform, and elevate ; and yet that it should be a power 
all hidden from us. It is oppressive to conceive what a 
world of human thought and human passion is dwelling 
on the silent and senseless paper, how much of wisdom 
is ready to make its entrance into the mind that is pre- 
pared to give it welcome. It is mournful to think that 
the multitudinous oracles should be dumb to us. 

Furthermore, there is this difficulty, that, in the 
multitude, mingled in the indiscriminate throng, are 
evil books ; or, if not evil, negative and worthless 
books. Thus the companionship is not only difficult, 
but it may be dangerous ; the difficulty of making wise 
and happy choice, and the perilous presence of what is 
vicious in the guise of books. 

Such are some of the difficulties which beset us, when 
we would bring the influence of books into the culture 
of our spiritual nature. These lectures are intended to 
present some thoughts and suggestions with a view k 
the surmounting of these difficulties, and to guidance 
into the department of English literature. I propose 
now to consider the general principles of literature, and 

3* 



36 



LECTURE FIRST. 



in the next lecture to trace some of the applications 
of these principles in the formation of our habits of 
leading. 

The discouraging effect which is produced by the pre- 
sent and perpetually increasing multitude of books is, in 
some degree, lessened by the thought that all are not 
literature. A vast deal of paper is printed and folded 
and shaped into the outward fashion of a book, that never 
enters into the literature of the language. What (it may 
be asked) is Literature ? This is a question not enough 
thought of; the answer to it is important, but by no 
means, I think, difficult, when once we see the necessity 
of making the discrimination. Books that are technical, 
that are professional, that are sectarian, are not litera- 
ture in the proper sense of the term. The great charac- 
teristic of literature, its essential principle, is that it is 
addressed to man as man ; it speaks to our common hu- 
man nature ; it deals with every element in our being 
that makes fellowship between man and man through all 
ages of man's history and through all the habitable re- 
gions of this planet. According to this view, literature 
excludes from its appropriate province whatever is ad- 
dressed to men as they are parted into trades, and profes- 
sions, and sects — parted, it may be, in the division for 
mutual good ) or, it may be, by vicious and unchristian 
alienation. It is the relation to universal humanity 
which constitutes literature \ it matters not how elevated, 
whether it be history, philosophy, or poetry, in its highest 
aspirations ; or how humble, it may be the simplest 
rhyme or story that is level to the unquestioning faith 
and untutored intellect of childhood : let it but be ad- 
dressed to. our common human nature, it is literature in 



PRINCIPLES OF LITERATURE. 



32 



the true sense of the term. No man can put it aside and 
say, u It concerns not me :" no woman can put it aside and 
say, " It concerns not me" The books which do not enter 
into the literature of a language are limited in their uses, for 
they hold their intercourse with something narrower than 
human nature, while that which is literature has an au- 
dience-chamber capacious as the soul of man — enduring 
as his immortality. It has a voice whose rhythm is in 
harmony with the*pulses of the human heart. It is this, 
and this alone — this universality — which places a book in 
a Nation's literature. It matters not what the subject, or 
what the mode of treating — be there but one touch of 
nature to make the whole world kin — it is enough to lift 
it into the region of literature. A London linen-draper 
writes a treatise on Angling, with no other thought, per- 
haps, than to teach an angler's subtle craft, but infusing 
into his art so much of Christian meekness, so deep a 
feeling for the beauties of earth and sky, such rational 
loyalty to womanhood, and such simple, child-like love of 
song, the songs of bird, of milk-maid, and of minstrel, that 
this little book on fishing has earned its life of two hundred 
years already, outliving many a more ambitious book, and 
Izaak Walton has a place of honour amid British authors, 
and has the love even of those who have learned the 
poet-moralist's truer wisdom, 

"Never to blend our pleasure or our pride 
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels."* 

I speak of this instance to show how a subject which is 
indifferent to many, and even repulsive to not a few, may 
be redeemed and animated by the author's true human- 



* Wordsworth's Poems, Hart Leap Well. Collective edition, p. 152. 



22 



LECTURE FIRST. 



heartedness. How much deeper then must be the inte- 
rest of all the subjects, in the vast variety, with which 
there is universal sympathy ! How much mightier must 
be the agency of literature as it passes beyond and above 
that which is local and limited, temporary or conventional, 
into the region of the spiritual and the eternal, when it 
enters into the very soul of man, admonishing it of its 
weakness, and of its strength, and of its immortality ! 

Now, whether we look at the simpler 1 and humbler aims 
of literature — healthful, innocent recreation — the recupe- 
rative influences which blend so happily with the severer 
functions of life, or whether we contemplate its elevating 
and chastening power on the minds of men, we cannot 
mistake that its just and great attribute is its univer- 
sality. It speaks to every ear that is not deaf to it. It 
asks admission into every heart. The books that are not 
literature have the professional, the technical, but not 
the human stamp : some, the law-books for instance, put 
on an outward garb of their own, as if to warn all but 
one class of readers away from them. But observe the 
books which are Literature, how they speak to a peo- 
ple — to a whole nation — to scattered nations over the 
earth linked together by community of speech, above all 
such glorious community as our English speech; nay, 
more, so far as the Babel barriers which make the parti- 
tions of the earth are overleaped, a literature addresses 
itself to all mankind. This is true of even the light and 
more perishable literature, recreating and gladdening the 
hearts of men, if but for a season ; and it is more last- 
ingly true of the higher literature — for instance, our 
abundant and varied English essay-literature, philosophy, 
history with all its kindred themes, and poetry. Is it 



PRINCIPLES OF LITERATURE. 33 

not for every fellow-being speaking the English tongue, 
that Addison and Charles Lamb, the " Spectator" and 
" Elia," have written ? Is it not for every one who is 
willing to be lifted up to the high places of philosophy, 
that Bacon's words of wisdom were recorded ? It is for 
all, that Clarendon's pictured page displays its great gal- 
lery of historic portraits : it is for all, that Arnold, in our 
own day, has shown how a mighty historian can throw a 
sacred light over profane history, by tracing God's provi- 
dence in the annals of a pagan people. It is every 
man and every woman whom Spenser leads into the 
jmnny and the shadowy spaces of his marvellous allegory ; 
and Shakspeare into that more wondrous region, the soul 
of man, with its depths of goodness and of evil, brighter 
and darker than aught in the region of romance. In our 
own times, it was for all his race that Byron gave utter- 
ance to his passionate poetry : it was for all Christian 
readers that Southey, in his " Eastern Epics," inter- 
wove, with the heathen fable, bright threads of the glory 
of Christian faith; and it is for every one who takes 
thought of the deep things of his nature, the mysteries 
of his being, memories of early innocence and yearnings 
for eternity, that Wordsworth struck his lofty ryric, the 
most sublime ode in this and, perhaps, any language, on 
the birth — the life — the undying destiny of the soul of 
man. 

I have dwelt upon this prime quality of literature, its 
universality, because, simple as it is, it is practically lost 
sight of, in the propensity to identify all things in the shape 
)f books with literature. Whatever is meant to minis- 
ter to our universal human nature, either in the nature 
jf the subject or the handling of it ; takes its place ; in 



34 



LECTURE FIRST. 



some range or other of literature : and nothing else is 
so entitled. And here let me step aside for a moment to 
notice an unworthy and very inadequate term, which, in 
its day has had some currency as a substitute for the term 
" literature." I refer to that vapid, half-naturalized term 
" belles-lettres," which was more in vogue formerly than 
now, getting currency, I suppose, during a period of 
shallow criticism not very remote from our day, when 
Doctor Blair and Lord Karnes were great authorities. I 
have never met with anybody who could tell me what 
precise meaning it is meant to convey. The term had an 
appropriateness for much in the literature of France, but 
translate the words and transfer them to English literature, 
and how inane is such a title, so applied ! Doctor Johnson 
has given it a place in the English vocabulary, and tells 
us it means " polite literature," which does not help the 
matter much. I should not have thought it worth while 
to stop to comment on this term, if I did not believe it to 
be not only vague and inadequate, but also mischievous ; 
and it is well known what power of mischief there may be 
in a word. " Belles-lettres" — fine letters — polite litera- 
ture — what thought do these terms convey but of luxuries 
of the mind, a refined amusement, but no more than 
amusement, confectionaries (as it were) of the mind, 
rather than needful, solid, healthy, life-sustaining food. 
If the term " belles-lettres" excludes the weighty and 
sublime productions of the mind, then is it a miserable 
substitute for what should be comprehended in such a 
term as "literature:" if it includes them, then is it a piti- 
fully inapposite title. Now the mischief is just here : this 
dainty, feeble term leads people to suppose that literature 
is aii easy, indolent cultivation, a sort of passive, patrician 



PRINCIPLES OF 



LITERATURE. 



85 



pleasure, instead of demanding dutiful and studious and 
strenuous energy. It lowers the great works of genius, as 
if they could be approached indolently, thoughtlessly, and 
without preparatory discipline. When the term was most 
in use, it was meant for that which is essential literature, 
and yet how meanly inadequate and injurious is it now in 
the department of poetry, if applied to the Fairy Queen, 
Paradise Lost, The Excursion! We might call the 
fanciful things in The Rape of the Lock, creations; but 
who will so speak of Milton's ruined Archangel, or Lear, 
or Hamlet ? It is to be noticed that as the term " belles- 
lettres" was introduced in a feeble age of the British 
mind, so it has been in a great measure cast out by the 
deeper philosophy of criticism which has arisen in this 
century. 

I have adverted to this subject, because the term de- 
tracts from that which is the prime characteristic of lite- 
rature — its universality — its appeal to man as man. In 
this simple, elementary principle, we may unfold some of 
the manifold powers and uses of a literature : it would not 
thus address itself to all human beings, whose minds can 
be open to it, unless it had some great purpose — some 
worthier end than pastime. It is one of the countless and 
varied influences under which man's spiritual being passes 
through this mortal life. It is one agency amid many, 
only one among many, for we must not exaggerate its 
importance. We are dwelling amid the things of sight 
and sound in this inanimate world; and that has its in- 
fluences on the soul of man : we are dwelling in the social 
world of kindred human beings, giving and receiving from 
one another impressions to last, it maybe, through eternity • 
we are living amid the spiritual agencies which are vouch- 



30 



LECTURE FIRST. 



safed to redeemed man : and our life is also in the world 
of books. 

And books, we know, 
Are a substantial world, both pure and good: 
Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, 
Our pastime and our happiness will grow.* 

I have spoken of literature as only one of the powers 
from which the mind of man is to receive culture and 
discipline, for although the common danger lies in another 
direction, it may encroach upon other powers to our 
grievous spiritual injury. It may win us too much away 
from the discipline of actual life into an intellectual luxuri- 
ousness : it may withdraw us too much from all of earth 
and sky that for wise purposes is sensible to us, and we 
may thus lose that contemplative spirit, which can " find 
tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in 
stones, and good in every thing." We must not be un- 
mindful how exquisitely the individual man and the ex- 
ternal world are fitted to each other, so that it is scarce a 
poetic exaggeration, that 

One impulse from a vernal wood 

May teach you more of man, 
Of moral evil and of good, 

Than all the sages can.f 

My present purpose is to consider this one agency — lite- 
rature — as a means of culture of character, manly and 
womanly ; but, at the same time, let it be borne in mind 
that nothing conduces more to the well-being and strength 
of the soul than to keep it open to all the healthful in- 
fluences which are provided for it, and to hold them all 



* Wordsworth. Sonnet, " Personal Talk," p. 186. 
t Wordsworth. "The Tables Turned," p. 337. 



PRINCIPLES OF LITERATURE. 



•37 



in true adjustment. There is a time for the eye to dwell 
on the printed page, but there is also a time to gaze "on 
earth, air, ocean, and the starry sky there is a time to 
look into the faces of" our fellow-beings, the bright and 
laughing face, or the sad and sorrowing one; there is a 
time too for silent, solitary, spiritual looking inward into 
the soul itself ; and thus by no one function, but by many, 
does man build up his moral being. Such is education, 
in its large and true significancy. Looking to literature 
as our present subject, and having ascertained that its 
prime quality is its power of addressing itself to man as 
man, let us now see for what purpose it so deals with our 
common humanity, that we may have a principle to 
guide us in our choice of books. One of the most acute 
and logical minds of our time, that of him who has coupled 
his name with a morbid and ill-omened title — I refer to 
Mr. De Quincey, the English opium-eater — has drawn a 
distinction between two species of literature. u There is," 
he says, " first, the literature of knowledge, and, secondly, tho 
literature of power. The function of the first is to teach; 
the function of the second is to move. . . . The very 
highest work that has ever existed in the literature of 
knowledge is but a provisional work ; a book upon trial 
and sufferance. Let its teaching be even partially revised, 
let it be but expanded, nay, even let its teaching be but 
placed in a better order, and instantly it is superseded. 
Whereas the feeblest work in the literature of power, 
surviving at all, survives as finished and unalterable among 
men. For instance, the Principia of Sir Isaac Newton 
was a book militant on earth from the first. In all stages 
of its progress it would have to fight for its existence : first, 
as regards absolute truth ; secondly, when that combat is 

C 4 



3? 



LECTURE FIRST. 



over, as regards its form or mode of presenting the truth. 
And as soon as a La Place or anybody else builds higher 
upon the foundations laid by this book, effectually he 
throws it out of the sunshine into decay and darkness ; by 
weapons even from this book he superannuates and de- 
stroys it, so that soon the name of Newton remains as a 
mere nominis umbra, but his book, as a living power, has 
transmigrated into other forms. Now, on the contrary, 
the Iliad, the Prometheus of iEschylus, the Othello or 
King Lear, the Hamlet or Macbeth, and the Paradise 
Lost are not militant, but triumphant power as long as the 
languages exist in which they speak or can be taught to 
speak. They never can transmigrate into new incarnations. 
. . . All the literature of knowledge builds only ground- 
nests, that are swept away by floods, or confounded by the 
plough ; but the literature of power builds nests in aerial 
altitudes, of temples sacred from violation, or of forests in- 
accessible to fraud. This is a great prerogative of the 
power-literature. . . . The knowledge-liteY&tvLre, like the 
fashion of this world, passeth away. ... But all litera- 
ture, properly so called, ... for the very same reason that 
it is so much more durable than the literature of know- 
ledge is . . . more intense and electrically searching in 
its impressions. The directions in which the tragedy of 
this planet has trained our human feelings to play, and 
the combinations into which the power of this planet has 
thrown our human passions of love and hatred, of ad- 
miration and contempt, exercises a power bad or good 
over human life that cannot be contemplated when seen 
stretching through many generations, without a sentiment 
allied to awe. And of this let every one be assured, that 
he owes to the impassioned books which he has read many 



PRINCIPLES OF LITERATURE. 



89 



a thousand more of emotions than he can consciously trace 
back to them. Dim by their origination, these emotions 
yet arise in him, and mould him through life like the for- 
gotten incidents of childhood."* 

The distinction thus drawn between the literature of 
knowledge and the literature of power is, however, of un- 
certain application to many books in which, while the chief 
object is to impart information of some kind, power is 
given also ; but this is certain that in all literature of a 
high order — a nation's purest literature, it is power that is 
given, and not knowledge. But what, it may be asked, is 
this Power which literature creates in the spirits of men ? 
what is this soul-engendered energy ? The knowledge- 
literature is measurable, and we can judge of the utility 
of this or that branch of it, its aptness to this or that 
man, this or that woman : but the power-literature is im- 
measurable, because it partakes of the infinite, and pass- 
ing through and beyond the mere intellect, it dwells in the 
deep places of the soul. The common products of educa- 
tion are tangible and temporal, but there is a higher edu- 
cation that lifts you into the region of things eternal, 
" Truths that wake to perish never." There is an educa- 
tion which deals with acquirements, accomplishments; 
learning it may be, and, in all this, there may be vast variety 
and a huge profit, but there will be a transitoriness and 
withal weariness and vexation of spirit in it. There is a 
higher education, which is akin to religion, for it is a 
ministry of the soul, and deals not so much with what wa 
know as with what we are, what we can do and what we can 
suffer, and what we may become here and hereafter. 



* Essay on Pope, pp. 149, 152. American edition. 



LECTURE FIRST. 



Thus it is that there are books of knowledge, and of 
power — books that make us more knowing, and books 
that make us wiser, and, in that wisdom, better. 

This great distinctive principle gives good guidance 
to us, and it may be made most practical if a little 
thoughtful discrimination be bestowed in our inter- 
course with books; instead of apathy on the one hand, 
or on the other the voracious appetite that takes no 
heed of the various uses of books. A book may be read 
merely to talk about, and that is perhaps the meanest 
thing to read it for : it may be read for amusement, and 
that may be seasonable and salutary ; but it also may be 
read for happiness, rather than for mere pleasure, for a 
perpetual rather than a passing joy : it may give health of 
mind, vigour, and vision : the heart may beat all the truer 
for it; the mind's eye may see all the clearer for it. As 
you close a book, ask yourself what it has done for you ; and 
better, perhaps, than criticism or any outer counsel, shall 
the silent communings of your heart tell you whether the 
oracle was a good or an evil one. 

I have thus sought to show how, amid the hundreds of 
thousands of books which are accumulating in the world, 
we may select as " literature" those which are character- 
ized by the universality of being addressed to man as man; 
and how, in the next place, we may contract it to a more 
essential literature, in the books which strengthen rather 
than store the mind — giving it power rather than apparel; 
and then, how we may raise it to a purer and higher lite- 
rature, in the books which, by calling forth the good ele- 
ments in our being and by chastening the evil ones, give 
spiritual health, and innocence, and moral power. Let 
these principles be taken to heart, and let there be some 



PRINCIPLES OF LITERATURE. 



41 



thoughtful and genial intercourse with books, and there 
comes by degrees what seems almost an instinct to guide 
us in our companionship with them — leading to the good 
and truthful, and turning us away from the foolish, the 
false, and the pernicious. Even moderate experience, let 
it only be docile, thoughtful, and affectionate, will win for 
you an almost intuitive sense in judging what books you 
may take to your heart as friends, and friends for life : 
it will give also that confidence, most valuable in the days 
of multitudinous publications, the confidence in deter- 
mining what books, and they are very many, it is good 
to be immutably ignorant of. 

Reflecting on what a book can do and ought to do 
for you — how it may act on your mind, and your mind 
react on it — and thus holding communion, you can 
travel through a wilderness of volumes onward, onward 
through time, wisely and happily, and with perfect 
vision of your way, as the woodman sees a path in the 
forest — a path to his home, while the wanderer, whether 
standing or staggering, is lost in blind and blank 
bewilderment. 

Literature, according to this conception of it, is to be 
employed for culture of character — manly character and 
womanly character. I speak of them separately, not be- 
cause it is necessary so to do with reference to that which 
is essential literature, but because attention has lately 
been drawn to the subject of the social position of wornan 
and there is heard at least a sound of conflicting opinions 
and opposing theories. It is a discussion into which 1 
mean not to enter, but only to touch upon in its connection 
with my present subject. Let me" say, in the first place, 
that I question whether it is proper, or even practicable. 



42 



LECTURE FIRST. 



so to detach womanhood from our common human nature 
as to make it a topic of distinct disquisition ; it seems to 
me a little too much like a naturalist's study of some sub- 
ject in zoology — the form and habits of some other species 
of created things. Again, as to all controversies respect- 
ing the equality of the sexes, or relative superiority or 
inferiority, I have only to say, that to me they are simply 
odious, — wrong, I believe, — in faith, in philosophy, and 
in feeling. Why should our minds be perplexed with 
modern speculations on this subject, when we have in- 
spired teaching, which, in a few words, if we will but 
look at them, will show us the whole truth : " And the 
Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be 
alone; I will make him an helpmeet for him." " God 
doth not say," observes an old English divine, "it is not 
good for man to be alone," " he doth not say it is not 
good for this or that particular man to be alone ; but it is 
not good in the general, for the whole frame of the world, 
that man should be alone."* Thus we find the creation 
of woman, and that providential law which preserves the 
equal numbers of the sexes, resting on the divinely- 
instituted principle of companionship, not alone of mar- 
riage, not alone of mother and child, but the manifold 
companionship of woman, single or married, companion- 
ship involving, of necessity, reciprocal dependence, but 
having nothing to do with equality or superiority or in- 
feriority on one side or the other. There is a law of 
companionship far deeper than that of uniformity, or 
equality, or similarity, the law which reconciles simili- 
tude and dissimilitude, the harmony of contrast, in which 



* Donne, voL iv. p. 19. 



PRINCIPLES OF LITERATURE. 



what is wanting on the one side finds its complement on 
the other, for, 

Heart with heart and mind with mind, 
Where the main fibres are entwined, 

Through Nature's skill, 
May even by contraries be joined 

More closely still.* 

Such was the exquisite companionship of the sexes a3 
they were represented in our first parents, and so, how- 
ever since disturbed, it remains as the ideal for all the 
generations of men and women. There was adduced another 
law, when the words were pronounced to the woman, 
" Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule 
over thee and thus dominion was mingled with com- 
panionship — dominion of one sex over the other, which 
no sophistry can evade, for it is divine and to endure 
with the earth and the race. Having its origin in evil, it 
grows with evil, and the woman sinks down into the 
slave, and the man into her more imbruted tyrant ; but 
goodness can still find the beauty of the primeval law of 
companionship undefaced by the element of dominion; 
for the penalty of dominion may, like the curse of labour, 
be converted into a blessing. As willing, dutiful labour 
brings gladness more than sorrow with it, so shall the 
fulfilment of the law of obedience win a glory of its own, 
brighter than any achievement of power. It is not by 
clamouring for rights, it is not by restless discontent, 
but it is by tranquil working out of the heaven-imposed 
law of obedience, that woman's weakness is transmuted 
into strength — a moral, spiritual power which man shall 
do homage to. Ambition, pride, wilfulness, or any 



* Wordsworth. The Grave of Burns* 



44 



LECTURE FIRST. 



earthly passion will but distort her being ; she struggles 
all in vain against a divine appointment, and sinks into 
more woful servitude, and the primeval curse weighs a 
thousand fold upon her, and the primeval companionship 
perishes. But bowing beneath that law which sounded 
through the darkening Paradise, she wins for her dower 
the only freedom that is worthy of woman — the moral 
liberty which God bestows upon the faithful and obedient 
spirit. It is from the soil of meekness that the true strength 
of womanhood grows, and it is because it has its root in 
such a soil that it has a growth so majestic, showering 
its blossoms and its fruits upon the world. Her influence 
follows man from the cradle to the grave, and the sphere 
of it is the whole region of humanity. We marvel at the 
might of it, because its tranquil triumphs are so placid 
and so noiseless, and penetrating into the deep places of 
our nature. It was the sun and the wind that in the 
fable strove for the mastery, and the strife was for a 
traveller's cloak ; the quiet moon had naught to do with 
such fierce rivalry of the burning or the blast, but as in 
her tranquil orbit she journeys round the earth, silently 
sways the tides of the ocean. 

There probably can be found no better test of civiliza- 
tion than the prevailing tone of feeling and opinion with 
regard to womanhood, and the recognition of woman's 
influences and social position. There may be the rude 
use of woman in barbaric life, or the frivolous uses of an 
over-civilized society. There may be the high-wrought 
adulation of an age of chivalry, which, so far as it is 
a sentiment of idolatry, is at once false and pernicious ; 
or there may be that wise and well-adjusted sense of 
affectionate reverence of womanhood, which is thoughtful 



PRINCIPLES OF LITERATURE. 



45 



of the vast variety of human companionship — matronly, 
maidenly, sisterly, daughterly. In woman, there may be 
a true sense of sex, its duties and its claims, meekness 
with its hidden heroism ; or there may be the unfeminine 
temper, fit to be rebuked by the Desdemona model.* 
Such a rebuke may be apposite where female character 
disfigures itself by obtrusiveness and self-sufficiency and 
pedantry. But, as far as my observation goes, that is not 
the state of society here ; on the contrary, there is needed 
an effort much more difficult than repressing the froward ; 
and that is, to lift modest, intelligent, sensitive woman- 
hood above the dread of the ridicule of pedantry. Manly 
culture would gain by it as well as womanly. I heard 
lately from a woman's lips one of the finest pieces of 
Shakspeare criticism I ever met with \ admirable in 
imagination and in the true philosophy of criticism, and 
yet uttered in conversation in the easy, natural inter- 
course of society.*)" Such should be the culture of woman, 
and such the tone of society, that these fine processes of 
womanly thought and feeling may mingle naturally with 
men's judgments. 

There may be a social condition in which womanly 



* "With regard to the Desdemoua model, it must also be remem- 
bered that it is not the only model of womanly character which the 
poet has left to the world ; on the contrary, he has given others of 
equal worth and beauty, varied to the infinite variety of womanly 
duty. Indeed, what a woman ought to do often depends upon what 
man does, and very often, too, on what he leaves undone : so that, 
while it may be her duty to bow "like the gentle lady married to ths 
Moor," man's wrongs or his omissions may call her to other duties- - 
going forth, like Imogen, for womanly well-doing in the open and 
rude places of the earth. H. R. 

f Mrs. Kemble. 



49 LECTURE FIRST. 



culture is in advance of the manly, and then the woman 
is placed in the sad dilemma of either lowering the tone of 
her own thoughts, or of raising the minds of men and 
their habits of thought — a task that demands all of wo- 
manly sagacity and gentleness, and is a trial to womanly 
modesty. The companionship of the sexes is important in 
the culture of each, and by such communion the marvel- 
lous harmony of diverse qualities is made more perfect for 
the strength and beauty of their common humanity. One 
of the latest strains of English poetry has well proclaimed 

" The woman's cause is man's : they rise or sink 
Together, dwarf d or godlike, bond or free : 
***** 
(She must) "Live, and learn, and be 
All that not harms distinctive womanhood, 
For woman is not undevelopt man, 
But diverse : could we make her as the man, 
Sweet love were slain, whose dearest bond is this 
Not like to Jkee, but like in difference : 
Yet in the long years liker must they grow, 
The man be more of woman, she of man ; 
He gain in sweetness and in moral height, 
Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world ; 
She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care ; 
More as the double-natured poet each : 
Till at the last she set herself to man 
Like perfect music unto noble words ; 
And so these twain, upon the skirts of Time, 
Sit side by side, full summ'd in all their powers, 
Dispensing harvest ; 

Self-reverent each, and reverencing each, 
Distinct in individualties ; 
But like each other, even as those who love : 
Then comes the statelier Eden back to men."* 



* I quote from that late poem of Mr. Tennyson's, " The Princess/* 
which has made a deep impression on the thoughtful criticism of hii 



PRINCIPLES OF LITERATURE. 



4l 



I have been tempted further into this subject than I 
meant to be, but what I have said respecting the com- 
panionship of the sexes can have no better illustration 
than in the study of literature. All that is essential lite- 
rature belongs, alike to mind of woman and of man ; it 
demands the same kind of culture from each, and most 
salutary may the companionship of mind be found, giving 
reciprocal help by the diversity of their power. Let us 
see how this will be. In the first place, a good habit of 
reading, whether in man or woman, may be described as 
the combination of passive recipiency from the book and 
the mind's reaction upon it : this equipoise is true culture. 
But, in a great deal of reading, the passiveness of im- 
pression is well nigh all, for it is luxurious indolence, and 
the reactive process is neglected. With the habitual 

countrymen, and which has been described as having for its leading 
purpose the exhibiting the true idea and dignity of womanhood. I 
will not part from it without citing that other fine tribute to womanly 
influence — a manly acknowledgment full of deep thought and of true 
feeling, when he speaks of 

" One 

Not learned, save in gracious household ways, 

Not perfect, nay, but full of tender wants ; 

No angel, but a dearer being all dipt 

In angel instincts, breathing paradise, 

Interpreter between the gods and men, 

Who looked all native to her place, and yet 

On tiptoe seem'd to touch upon a sphere 

Too gross to tread, and all male minds perforco 

Sway'd to her from their orbits as they moved, 

And girdled her with music. Happy he 

With such a mother ! faith in womankind 

Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high 

Comes easy to him, and, though he trip and fall, 

He shall not blind his soul with clay." £L R. 



LECTURE FIRST. 



novel-reader, for instance, the luxury of reading becomes 
a perpetual stimulant, with no demand on the mind's own 
energy, and slowly wearing it away. The true enjoyment 
of books is when there is a co-operating power in the 
reader's mind — an active sympathy with the book ; and 
those are the best books which demand that of you. 
And here let me notice how unfortunate and, indeed, mis- 
chievous a term is the word " taste" as applied in inter- 
course with literature or art; a metaphor taken from a 
passive sense, it fosters that lamentable error, that litera- 
ture, which requires the strenuous exertion of action and 
sympathy, may be left to mere passive impressions. The 
temptation to receive an author's mind unreflectingly and 
passively is common to us all, but greater, I believe, for 
women, who gain, however, the advantages of a readier 
sympathy and a more unquestioning faith. The man's 
mind reacts more on the book, sets himself more in 
judgment upon it, and trusts less to his feelings ; but, in 
all this, he is in more danger of bringing his faculties 
separately into action : he is more apt to be misled by our 
imperfect systems of metaphysics, which give us none 
but the most meagre theories of the human mind, and 
which are destined, I believe, to be swept away, if ever a 
great philosopher should devote himself to the work of 
analyzing the processes of thought. That pervading error 
of drawing a broad line of demarcation between our mora] 
and intellectual nature, instead of recognising the inti- 
mate interdependence of thought and feeling, is a fallacy 
that scarce affects the workings of a woman's spirit. If 
a gifted and cultivated woman take a thoughtful interest 
in a book, she brings her whole being to bear on it, and 
hence there will often be a better assurance of truth in 



PRINCIPLES OF LITERATURE, 



49 



her conclusions than in man's more logical deductions, 
just as, by a similar process, she often shows finer and 
quicker tact in the discrimination of character. It 
has been justly remarked, that, with regard "to women 
of the highest intellectual endowments, we feel that we do 
them the utmost injustice in designating them by such 
terms as 1 clever/ i able/ 6 learned/ i intellectual they 
never present themselves to our minds as such. There is 
a sweetness, or a truth, or a kindness — some grace, some 
charm, some distinguishing moral characteristic which 
keeps the intellect in due subordination, and brings them 
to our thoughts, temper, mind, affections, one harmo- 
nious whole. " 

A woman's mind receiving true culture and preserving 
its fidelity to all womanly instincts, makes her, in our 
intercourse with literature, not only a companion, but a 
counsellor and a helpmate, fulfilling in this sphere the 
purposes of her creation. It is in letters as in life, and 
there (as has been well said) the woman "who praises and 
blames, persuades and resists, warns or exhorts upon 
occasion given, and carries her love through all with a 
strong heart, and not a weak fondness — she is the true 
helpmate/'* 

Cowper, speaking of one of his female friends, writes, 
"She is a critic by nature and not by rule, and has a 
perception of what is good or bad in composition, that I 
never knew deceive her ; insomuch that when two sorts 
of expressions have pleaded equally for the precedence in 
my own esteem, and I have referred, as in such cases I 



* The Statesman, by Henry Taylor, p. 70. 
5 



50 



LECTURE FIT18T. 



always did, the decision of the point to her, I never 
knew her at a loss for a just one."* 

His best biographer, Southey, alluding to himself, and 
to the influence exerted on Wordsworth's mind by the 
genius of the poet's sister, adds the comment, " Were I to 
say that a poet finds his best advisers among his female 
friends, it would be speaking from my own experience, 
and the greatest poet of the age would confirm it by his. 
But never was any poet more indebted to such friends 
than Cowper. Had it not been for Mrs. Unwin, he would 
probably never have appeared in his own person as an 
author ; had it not been for Lady Austen, he never would 
have been a popular one." 

The same principles which cause the influences thus 
salutary to authorship, will carry it into reading and 
study, so that by virtue of this companionship the logical 
processes in the man's mind shall be tempered with more 
of affection, subdued to less of wilfulness, and to a truer 
power of sympathy; and the woman's spirit shall lose 
none of its earnest, confiding apprehensiveness in gaining 
more of reasoning and reflection ; and so, by reciprocal 
influences, that vicious divorcement of our moral and 
intellectual natures shall be done away with, and the 
powers of thought and the powers of affection be brought 
into that harmony which is wisdom. The woman's mind 
must rise to a wiser activity, the man's to a wiser 
passiveness ; each true to its nature, they may consort in 
such just companionship that strength of mind shall pass 
from each to each ; and thus chastened and invigorated, 
the common humanity of the sexes rises higher than it 



* Southey's Cowper, vol. ii. p. 35. 



Principles of literature, 51 

could be carried by either the powers peculiar to man or 
the powers peculiar to woman. 

Now in proof of this, if we were to analyze the philo- 
sophy which Coleridge employed in hi3 judgment on 
books, and by which he may be said to have made criti- 
cism a precious department of literature — raising it into 
a higher and purer region than was ever approached by 
the contracted and shallow dogmatism of the earlier 
schools of critics — it would, I think, be proved that he 
differed from them in nothing more than this, that he 
cast aside the wilfulness and self-assurance of the mere 
reasoning faculties; his marvellous powers were wedded 
to a child-like humility and a womanly confidingness, 
and thus his spirit found an avenue, closed to feeble and 
less docile intellects, into the deep places of the souls of 
mighty poets : his genius as a critic rose to its majestic 
height, not only by its inborn manly strength, but because, 
with woman-like faith, it first bowed beneath the law of 
obedience and love. 

It is a beautiful example of the companionship of the 
manly and womanly mind, that this great critic of whom 
I have been speaking proclaimed, by both principle and 
practice, that the sophistications which are apt to gather 
round the intellects of men, clouding their vision, are 
best cleared away by that spiritual condition more conge- 
nial to the soul of woman, the interpenetrating the 
reasoning powers with the affections. 

Coleridge taught his daughter that there is a spirit of 
love to which the truth is not obscured ; that there are 
natural partialities, moral sympathies, which clear rather 
than cloud the vision of the mind ; that in our commu- 
nion with books, as with mankind, it is not true that 



LECTURE FIRST. 



i( love is blind." The daughter has preserved the lesson 
in lines worthy of herself ; her sire, and the precious 
truth embodied in them : 

" Passion is blind, not love ; her wondrous might 
Informs with three-fold power man's inward sight; 
To her deep glance the soul, at large displayed, 
Shows all its mingled mass of light and shade : 
Men call her blind when she but turns her head, 
Nor scans the fault for which her tears are shed. 
Can dull Indifference or Hate's troubled gaze 
See through the secret heart's mysterious maze ? 
Can Scorn and Envy pierce that " dread abode" 
Where true faults rest beneath the eye of God? 
Not theirs, 'mid inward darkness, to discern 
The spiritual splendours, how they shine and burn. 
All bright endowments of a noble mind 
They, who with joy behold them, soonest find; 
And better none its stains of frailty know 
Than they who fain would see it white as snow."* 

I have in this introductory lecture attempted nothing 
beyond the exposition of a few broad and simple princi- 
ples of literature, the importance of which will perhaps 
best be seen in the practical application of them to the 
guidance and formation of our habits of reading. It 

* Biographia Literaria, of S. T. C. Vol. i. Part. 1. p. clxxxiv. 
Ed. 1847. This daughter was Mrs. Sara Coleridge, who died in 1852. 
I do not know where I can more appositely note the fact, that, when 
after years of constant literary correspondence with different mem- 
bers of the Coleridge family, Mr. Reed visited England in 1854, the 
welcome he received from them was most cordial and affectionate. 
He was greeted as an old friend and taken home to their very hearts. 
Since his death, no more earnest and affectionate tributes to his 
memory, no more accurate appreciation of his character, have been 
paid than by this circle of his kind English friends. Especially I 
will venture to refer to Mr. Justice Coleridge and his kinsman, the 
Re?. Derwent Coleridge of St. Mark's College, Chelsea. W. B. 



PRINCIPLES OP LITERATURE. 



58 



was my intention to have worked those principles out 
co their application, but I have already consumed more 
of your time than I desire to do during one evening. 
It seemed necessary to show, in the first place, that 
I appreciated the difficulties which are caused by the 
multiplicity of books; and then to set forth these es- 
sential principles of literature, as distinguished from 
mere books, that it is addressed to our universal human 
nature, and that it gives power not to the intellect alone, 
but to our whole spiritual being; and that if it be true 
to its high purpose, it gives power of wisdom and happi- 
ness. I felt it to be important also, with a view to some 
applications to be made in subsequent lectures — to con- 
sider the reciprocal relations of the manly and womanly 
mind. 

I propose in the next lecture to consider the applica- 
tion of these principles to habits and courses of reading ; 
reserving for the third lecture the subject of the English 
language, to which I am anxious to devote an entire 
lecture. 



LECTURE IL 

gippIixHtian of IFttarg principles.* 

Narrow and exclusive lines of reading to be avoided — Catholicity of 
taste — Charles Lamb's idea of books — Ruskin — Habits of reading 
comprehensive — Ancient Literature — Foreign languages — Differ- 
ent eras of letters — English essay- writing — Macaulay — South ey — 
Scott and Washington Irving — Archdeacon Hare — Lord Bacon's 
Essays — Poetic taste — Influence of individual pursuits — Friends in 
Council — Serious and gay books — English humour — Southey's bal- 
lad — Necessity of intellectual discipline — Disadvantage of courses 
of reading — Books not insulated things — Authors who guide — 
Southey's Doctor — Elia — Coleridge — Divisions of Prose and Poetry 
— Henry Taylor's Notes from Books — Poetry not a mere luxury of 
the mind — Arnold's habits of study and taste — The practical and 
poetical element of Anglo-Saxon character — The Bible — Mosaic 
Poetry — Inadequacy of language — Lockhart's character of Scott — 
Arnold's character of Scipio — Tragic Poetry — Poetry for children — 
Robinson Crusoe and the Arabian Nights — Wordsworth's Ode to 
Duty — Character of Washington. 

In my last lecture I sought to show how, amid the multi- 
tude of books, we must in the first place seek guidance for 
our choice by laying down in our minds certain general 
principles respecting the essential properties and uses of 
literature. I endeavoured to show that nothing but what 
is addressed to man as man is literature, and that that is 
more appropriately and eminently literature which gives 
power rather than knowledge, and that that is worthy 
literature which gives power for good, healthful strength 



54 



* January 10, 1859. 



APPLICATION OF LITERARY PRINCIPLES. 



55 



of mind, wisdom, and happiness. Now let us see how we 
can follow the principles out to practical uses. It might 
be thought that such a definition of literature was too 
narrow a one ; that it was too high and serious a view of 
the subject; and that it would exclude much inoffensive 
and agreeable reading. When I speak of a book giving 
moral power and health, or even if I should use words of 
graver import, spiritual strength and health, I employ 
these expressions in their largest sense, as comprehending 
the whole range of our inner life, from the lonely and 
loftiest meditations down to casual, colloquial cheerfulness, 
so that literature, in its large compass, shall furnish sym- 
pathy and an answer to every human emotion, and to all 
moods of thought and feeling. It is important, in the first 
place, having settled in one's mind an idea of the general 
properties of literature, to give to it a large and liberal ap- 
plication : in other words, to avoid narrow and exclusive 
lines in reading, to cultivate a true catholicity of taste. 
In so doing, you enlarge your capacities of enjoyment; 
you expand the discipline as well as the delights of the 
mind. It is with books as with nature, travel widely, and 
while at one time, you may behold the glories of the 
mountains, or the sublimities of the sea, you shall at 
another take delight as genial in the valley and the brook. 
We must needs be watchful of our habits of reading in 
this respect, for favourite lines of reading may come to be 
too exclusive. A favourite author may have too large an 
occupation. Women should remember that in all that is 
essentially literature, they have a right in common with 
men, because the very essence of it is, that it addresses 
itself to no distinctive property of sex, but to human 
nature. Thej wrong themselves in shrinking from any 



56 



LECTURE SECOND. 



portion of the literature of their race, and they wrong man 
by not fulfilling in this respect the duty of companionship. 
For man and woman, alike, liberal communion with books 
is needed. I have known a person acquire late in life a 
hearty and healthful enjoyment of books, by this simple 
principle of opening the mind to docile and varied inter- 
course with them. I have known, on the other hand, that 
power of enjoyment lost, after years of intelligent and 
habitual reading, by giving way to a narrow bigotry in the 
choice of books. Daintiness, let it be always remembered, 
is disease, and fastidiousness is weakness. The healthy 
appetite of mind or body is strength for all healthful food. 
There was wisdom under the humour when Charles Lamb 
said, "I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not too 
genteel for me, nor Jonathan Wild too low. I can read 
anything which I call a book."* And a living writer, who 
has, with high power and eloquence, treated man's sense 
of enjoyment of nature and art, remarks : " Our purity 
of taste is best tested by its universality, for if we can only 
admire this thing or that, we may be sure that our cause 
for liking is of a finite and false nature. But if we can 
perceive beauty in every thing of God's doing, we may 
agree that we have reached the true perception of its uni- 
versal laws. Hence false taste may be known by its fas- 
tidiousness, by its demands of pomp, splendour, and 
unusual combination, by its enjoyment only of particular 
styles and modes of things, and by its pride also, for it is 
forever meddling, mending, accumulating, and self-exult- 
ing; its eye is always upon itself, and it tests all things 



* Lamb's Prose Works, vol. 3, p. 45. " Detached Thoughts cm 
jBooks and Reading." 



APPLICATION OF LITERARY PRINCIPLES. 



57 



around it by the way they fit it. But true taste is forever 
growing, learning, reading, worshipping, laying its hand 
upon its mouth because it is astonished, casting its shoes 
from off its feet because it finds all ground holy, lament- 
ing over itself, and testing itself by the way it fits things."* 
This finely-conceived contrast between the catholicity of 
true taste, and the narrowness of a false taste, is equally 
true as applied to literature. Indeed, it is matter of the 
highest moment in the guidance of our habits of reading 
to make them large and comprehensive ; it is essential to 
a just judgment of books, and also to a full enjoyment of 
them. We form a truer estimate of things, when we rise 
to a high point, and get a larger field of vision. A know- 
ledge of ancient literature, gives a deeper insight into the 
modern; if we see to what point, and in what manner, the 
pagan mind struggled, we can the better comprehend the 
higher destiny of the Christian mind. Acquaintance with 
foreign literature may help to a better estimate of our 
own. I shall have occasion hereafter, more than once, to 
trace the influences of the continental literature of Europe 
upon English literature. Let me here remark, that while 
the study of foreign languages and literature, along with 
many other advantages, may help us the better to under- 
stand and feel our own, it never can be made a substitute 
without great detriment. I make this remark, because in 
the education of the day, and especially in the education 
of women, there is a tendency to give to the mind a direc- 
tion too much away from the literature of our own speech. 
This arises partly, perhaps, from one of the misdirected 
aims of education, looking to the showiness of accomplish- 



* Ruskin's Modern Painters, vol. 1, p. 23. 



LECTURE SECOND. 



ments, rather than to more substantial and all-pervading 
good. If a man or a woman be ambitious of applause, 
and great or small celebrity, one's native literature is a 
much less effective weapon than a foreign literature; and 
the more remote that is, the more effective it is for osten- 
tation. But if there be a better purpose than feeding 
vanity, then, for all the best and most salutary influences, 
nothing can take the place of the vernacular— the litera- 
ture identified with the mother-tongue, with which 
alone our thoughts and feelings have their life and 
being. 

Further, an expanded habit of reading is most im- 
portant, as giving familiarity with different eras of our 
own literature. I hope to show in this course that the 
succession of those eras has a relation to each other much 
more life-like than a mere sequence of time. There is a 
continuity in a nation's literary as well as political life ; 
and no generation can cast off the accumulated influences 
of previous ages without grievous detriment to itself. 
There are many readers who dwell altogether in their 
own times, busy with what one day produces after 
another. This is a great error; and they are the less 
able to gain a rational knowledge of that very litera- 
ture, because exclusive familiarity with it gives no vision 
beyond, and, consequently, no capacity of comparison. 

Now just in proportion as one enlarges his reading 
into different periods, does his taste grow more en- 
lightened and wiser, and his judgment more assured. 
Let us take a practical example; and I turn for the 
purpose to the department of English Essay- Writing, 
in which the mind of our race has found utterance in 
several centuries. During the last few years there has 



APPLICATION OF LITERARY PRINCIPLES. 59 

been a large multitude of readers for Mr. Macaulay's 
Essays — brilliant, showy, attractive reading. But what 
assurance can any one of that multitude, who is unac- 
quainted with other productions in the same class of 
books, have, in his admiration of these essays ? How can 
he be assured that they are going to endure in our litera- 
ture, and that their attractions are rightful attractions? 
I myself believe that they will prove perishable, because 
the pungency of a period, and the dazzling effects of 
declamation are, to Mr. Macaulay, dearer at least than 
faith and charity. The admirer of his Essays may think 
otherwise, but whether he be right or wrong, he is not- 
entitled to form a judgment unless he has disciplined his 
power of judging by the reading of other works of a 
kindred nature — kindred, I mean, in form, not in spirit. 
Let him, therefore, turn to the other Essay-writing of our 
own times, (and it has been a large outlet for the con- 
temporary mind,) the essays of Southey, of Scott, of 
Washington Irving, the inimitable " Elia" of Charles 
Lamb, or that thoughtful and thought-producing miscel- 
lany, the u Guesses at Truth/ ' Then going back into 
other periods, and making choice of some of Dr. John- 
son's Essays in the latter part of the eighteenth century, 
and of Addison's or Steele's in the " Spectator'' and the 
" Tatler," in the early part of it, he will find his judg- 
ment enlarged by seeing how those generations dealt with 
this same branch of letters. Travelling back a century 
earlier, let him take the single volume of Lord Bacon's 
Essays, in which thoughts and suggestions of thought 
move in such solid phalanx that every line is a study. 
This is a simple rule for reading, and it may readily 
be practised : then bringing his acquaintance with tho 



60 



LECTURE SECOND. 



English essays of the last two hundred years, and the 
power of judgment he has at the same time been uncon- 
sciously gaining, back to the Macaulay Essays, and he 
will perceive that they are not what they used to be to 
him —that the brilliant essayist " 'gins to pale his ineffec- 
tual fire." A sense of enjoyment will indeed have passed 
away, but it will be because the reader has discovered 
elsewhere a deeper wisdom, a more tranquil beauty of 
thought and feeling, and of expression, a fuller beat of 
the human heart. The flashing of the will-o'-the-wisp shall 
no longer mislead him, who turns his looks to the steady 
cottage candle-light quietly shining out into the darkness, 
or to the still safer guidance of the slow-moving stars. 

The principle which I have thus endeavoured to ex- 
emplify, is important in all the divisions of literature. 
It is needful to lift us out of the influences which environ 
us, to raise us above prejudices and narrow judgments 
which are engendered by confinement to contemporaneous 
habits of opinion. I hope to show at another part of the 
course how we may enlarge and elevate our Sunday occu- 
pations, and fortify our judgment of the sermons we read 
and hear, by acquaintance with the earlier sacred and 
devotional literature, especially that of the seventeenth 
century. 

In nothing is familiarity with the literature of various 
periods more important than in the culture of poetic taste, 
our judgments and feelings for the poets. One meets 
perpetually with a confident partiality for some poet of 
the day, or a confident antipathy to another ; and, all the 
while, such confidence may be entirely unequal to that 
which is the simplest test — the capacity to comprehend and 
enjoy the poetry of other ages. The merits of the living 



APPLICATION OF LITERARY PRINCIPLES. 



61 



poets must be more or less in dispute ; and he alone has 
any claim to venture on a prediction, as to which shall 
be immortal and which ephemeral, who has cultivated his 
imagination by thoughtful communion with the great 
poets of former centuries. Let him, who is quick to con- 
demn, or slow to admire, ask whether the fault may not 
be in himself : — it may be the caprice or the apathy of 
uncultivated taste : he, and he alone, whose capacity 
of admiration has grown by culture ample enough to 
know and to feel the power of the poetry of the past, is 
qualified to speak in judgment of the poetry of the pre- 
sent. That this or that poem pleases him, who knows 
the present only, proves nothing : but he, whose imagina- 
tion responds to the Chaucer of the fourteenth century, 
the Spenser and Shakespeare of the sixteenth, and the 
Milton of the seventeenth century, can see truly the poets 
of the nineteenth century, foreknowing which light shall 
pass away like a conflagration or a meteor, and which is 
beginning a perpetual planetary motion with the great 
lights of all ages. 

I have spoken of the value of acquaintance with the 
literature of different eras, and the influence is reci- 
procal — the earlier upon the later, and the later upon 
the earlier. But with regard to the elder literature, 
there is an agency for good in the added sentiment of 
reverence. The mind bows, or ought to bow to it, as to 
age with its crown of glory. It is as salutary as for the 
youthful to withdraw for a season from the companion- 
ship of their peers, and to sit at the feet of the old, 
listening in reverential silence. In the elder literature, 
the perishable has passed away, and that is left which 
has put on its immortality. 



62 



LECTURE SECOND." 



A true catholicity of taste in our intercourse with 
books is in danger of being counteracted not only by the 
incessant and clamorous demand which the current lite- 
rature makes upon us, but also by the impulses which 
we may be exposed to in consequence of our individual 
pursuits and personal positions. This point has been 
wisely touched in a passage, which I would commend to 
the reflection of every one, in the recent volume of that 
thoughtful book, " Friends in Council" — -an admirable 
specimen of the essay-writing of our day. " There is," 
it is remarked, " a very refined use which reading is put 
to ; namely, to counteract the particular evils and tempta- 
tions of our callings, the original imperfections of our 
characters, the tendencies of our age, or of our own time 
of life. Those, for instance, who are versed in dull, 
crabbed work all day, of a kind which is always exer- 
cising the logical faculty and demanding minute, not to 
say, vexatious criticism, would, during their leisure, do 
wisely to expatiate in writings of a large and imaginative 
nature. These, however, are often the persons who parti- 
cularly avoid poetry and works of imagination, whereas 
they ought to cultivate them most. For it should be one 
of the frequent objects of every man who cares for the 
culture of his whole being, to give some exercise to those 
faculties which are not demanded by his daily occupations 
and not encouraged by his disposition."* 

In order to guard our habits of reading from the nar- 
rowing influences, which arise either from outward or 
Inward temptations, it is necessary to cultivate in our 
choice of books a large variety, remembering, however, 



* Arthur Helps : "Friends in Council." Part II., p. 15. 



APPLICATION OF LITERARY PRINCIPLES. 



-S3 



that the variety must be a healthful variety, and not 
that mere love of change, which, owning no law, is capri- 
cious, restless and morbid— at once a symptom and a 
cause of weakness, and not of health. To the mind that 
cultivates a thoughtful and well-regulated variety in' its 
reading, this reward will come, that, where before, things 
seemed separate and insulated, beautiful affinities will 
reveal themselves ; you will feel the brotherhood, as it 
were, that exists among all true books, and a deeper 
sense of the unity of all real literature, with its infinite 
variety. 

In adjusting a diversified course of reading, we must 
keep in mind that it is not alone the serious literature 
which gives us power and wisdom, for Truth is often 
earnest in its joyousness as in its gravity : and it is a 
beautiful characteristic of our English literature, that it 
has never been wanting in the happy compound of 
pathos and playfulness, which we style by that untrans- 
lateable term " Humour" — that kindly perception of 
the ridiculous which is full of gentleness and sympathy. 
It is a healthful element : it chastens the dangerous 
faculty of Wit, turning its envenomed shafts into 
instruments of healing : it comes from the full heart, 
and it dwells with charity and love of the pure and 
the lofty : it holds no fellowship with sarcasm or 
scoffing or ribaldry, which are issues from the hollow or 
the sickly heart, and are fatal to the sense of reverence 
and of many of the humanizing affections. A sound 
humourous literature may be found throughout English 
language, in prose and verse; from its earliest periods 
down to our own times, — from Chaucer to Southey and 
Charles Lamb; and it behooves us to blend it with graver 



64 



"LECTURE SECOND. 



reading, to bring it, like the innocent and happy face 
of childhood, in the presence of hard-thinking, self-occu- 
pied, care-worn, sullen men, a pensive cheerfulness to 
recreate despondency and dejection. It is, therefore, 
not only variety, but a cheerful variety, that should be 
cultivated. " No heart," it has been well said, " would 
have been strong enough to hold the woe of Lear and 
Othello, except that which had the unquenchable elasti- 
city of Falstaff and the 6 Midsummer Night's Dream/ "* 
As in the author, so in the reader — it is the large culture 
which gives the more equal command of our faculties, 
whereas if we close up any of the natural resources to 
the mind, there follows feebleness or disproportioned 
power, or moodiness and fantastic melancholy, and, in 
extreme cases, the crazed brain. If the statistics be 
accurate, it is an appalling fact that in that region of the 
United States in which the intellect has been stimulated 
to most activity, insanity prevails to an extent double 
that in sections of the country less favourably situated. 
It would seem that the activity of the intellect had been 
too much tended, and its health too little. It is a com- 
mon peril of humanity, with all its grades of danger, from 
the fitfulness of an ill-regulated mind up to the frenzy of 
the maniac. f 

* Hare's Guesses at Truth. Part L, p. 319. 

f This theory was no doubt founded on the assumption that the 
census statistics of insanity were correct; but my friend, and my 
brother's friend, Doctor Thomas J. Kirkbride, the superintendent of 
the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane, to whom I showed this 
passage, says, in a letter now before me : 

"It has been shown conclusively that there can be no dependence 
placed on the census returns, and, except Massachusetts, I know of no 
state that has instituted inquiries for the special purpose of ascer- 



APPLICATION OF LITERARY PRINCIPLES. 65 



There is a short poem of Southey's, which, in this con- 
nection, has a sad interest. Having written one of those 
humourous ballads drawn from his acquaintance with 
Spanish legendary history, he added an epilogue telling 
of its impressions on his household audience, especially 
the wondering and delighted faces of his children : he 
turns to his wife, 

But when I looked at my mistress* face 

It was all too grave the while ; 
And when I ceased, methought there was more 

Of reproof than of praise in her smile. 

That smile I read aright, for thus 

Reprovingly said she, 
" Such tales are meet for youthful ears, 

But give little content to me. 

" From thee far rather would I hear 

Some sober, sadder lay 
Such as I oft have heard, well pleased, 

Before those locks were gray." 

u Nay, mistress mine," I made reply, 

" The autumn hath its flowers, 
Nor ever is the sky more gay 

Than in its evening hours. 

* * * 



taining how many insane are to be found within her limits. Your 

brother's views correspond with those of most persons who have paid 

attention to the subject, and are probably correct; but it must also be 

remembered that there is apparently, at least, most insanity where the 

largest provision is made for the treatment; for large numbers of cases 

then come before the public notice which previously had been kept 

out of observation. New England being a pioneer in providing State 

Hospitals, the number of insane is better known than in those state? 

which have just commenced the erection of institutions of that 

character." W. B. R. 

6* 



66 



LECTURE SECOND. 



" That sense which held me back in youth 

From all intemperate gladness, 
That same good instinct bids me shun 

Unprofitable sadness. 

" Nor marvel you if I prefer 

Of playful themes to sing : 
The October grove hath brighter tints 

Than summer or than spring ; 

" For o'er the leaves before they fall 

Such hues hath nature thrown, 
That the woods wear in sunless days 

A sunshine of their own. 

" Why should I seek to call forth tears ? 

The source from whence we weep 
Too near the surface lies in youth, 

In age it lies too deep. 

" Enough of foresight sad, too much 

Of retrospect have I : 
And well for me that I sometimes 
" * Can put those feelings by ; 

" From public ills, and thoughts that else 

Might weigh me down to earth, 
That I can gain some intervals 

For healthful, hopeful mirth."* 

This is a poet's wise pleading, and there is warning in 
the fact that this wife's shrinking from her husband's 
healthful, hopeful mirth, was the precursor of insanity : and 
it is sad to know that the poet's own lofty and richly stored 
mind sank, not, as has been supposed, from the exhaus- 
tion of an over-tasked brain, but under the wasting watch- 
ings over the wanderings of the crazed mind of the wife. 
This deepens the pensive humour of the lesson he has left 



* Southey's Poetical Works, vol. vi. p. 282. 



APPLICATION OF LITERARY PRINCIPLES. 



6? 



us — to find joyous, or at least cheerful companionship, as 
well as serious, in books. 

Assuming that this catholicity of taste, the value of 
which I have endeavoured to present, is acquired, it then 
becomes a matter of much moment to have some princi- 
ples to guide one through the large spaces of which the 
mind has vision. The capacity for extended and various 
reading may lose much of its value, if undisciplined and 
desultory. Indeed, if a large and varied power of reading 
be indulged in a desultory and chance way, it is likely to 
be lost : there is no genuine and permanent catholicity of 
taste for books but what is guarded by principles, and has 
a discipline of its own. That discipline is twofold : it is 
guidance we get from other minds, and that which we get 
from our own ) and as these are well and wisely combined, 
we may secure ample independence for our own thinking, 
and ample respect for the wisdom of others. 

It is not unfrequently thought that the true guidance 
for habits of reading is to be looked for in prescribed 
courses of reading, pointing out the books to be read, and 
the order of proceeding with them. Now, while this ex- 
ternal guidance may to a certain extent be useful, I do 
believe that an elaborately prescribed course of reading 
would be found neither desirable nor practicable. It does 
not leave ft-eedom enough to the movements of the reader's 
own mind ; it does not give free enough scope to choice. 
Our communion with books, to be intelligent, must be more 
or less spontaneous. It is not possible to anticipate how 
or when an interest may be awakened in some particular 
subject or author, and it would be far better to break away 
from the prescribed list of books, in order to follow out 
that interest while it is a thoughtful impulse. It would 



88 LECTURE SECOND. 

be a sorry tameness of intellect that would not, sooner or 
later, work its way out of the track of the best of any such 
prescribed courses. This is the reason, no doubt, why 
they are so seldom attempted, and why, when attempted, 
they are apt to fail. 

It may be asked, however, whether every thing is to be 
left to chance or caprice, whether one is to read what acci- 
dent puts in the way — what happens to be reviewed or 
talked about. No ! far from it : there would in this be no 
more exercise of rational will than in the other process ; 
in truth, the slavery to chance is a worse evil than slavery 
to authority. So far as the origin of a taste for reading 
can be traced in the growth of the mind, it will be found, 
I think, mostly in the mind's own prompting; and the 
power thus engendered is, like all other powers in our 
being, to be looked to as something to be cultivated and 
chastened, and then its disciplined freedom will prove 
more and more its own safest guide. It will provide 
itself with more of philosophy than it is aware of in its 
choice of books, and will the better understand their rela- 
tive virtues. On the other hand, I apprehend that often 
a taste for reading is quenched by rigid and injudicious 
prescription of books in which the mind takes no interest, 
can assimilate nothing to itself, and recognises no progress 
but what the eye takes count of in the reckoning of pages 
it has travelled over. It lies on the mind, unpalateable, 
heavy, undigested food. But reverse the process : observe 
or engender the interest as best you may, in the young 
mind, and then work with that — expanding, cultivating, 
chastening it. 

It matters little from what point, or with what book a 
young reader begins his career, provided he brings along 



APPLICATION GF LITERARY PRINCIPLES. 



09 



that thoughtful spirit of inquiry in which activity and 
docility are justly balanced. No good book is an insulated 
thing ; you can always, if you will but look for them, dis- 
cover leadings on to something else — other books on the 
same or kindred subjects — or other books by the same 
author. You acquire an affection for an author, and that 
may be made to embrace the books of his affection. I 
know of no more practical or safer principle in the gui- 
dance of one's reading, than thus to follow an author in 
whom you feel that your confidence is well placed. There 
are what may, in this respect, be called guiding authors, 
whose genial love of letters was not only a light to their 
own lives, but still shines, a lamp to show the path to 
others. You feel that what they loved may fitly be loved 
by you ; that what stirred their spirits may have a power 
over yours. And so shall we find perpetual guidance, fol- 
lowing it with freedom and loyalty, and extending our 
acquaintance with books just in the way in which we do 
with our acquaintance with living men and women. We 
use books for instruction or amusement, but hardly enough 
for guidance. Let me rapidly exemplify this principle, 
the value of which is, perhaps, in danger of being over- 
looked only from its simplicity. Take such a book as 
Southey's Life of Cowper, and you shall perceive the mind 
of Cowper and of his biographer so touching in various 
ways upon other authors, as to attract you to a large and 
admirable variety of the best literature in the language. 
Taking that remarkable work " The Doctor" in which 
Southey poured forth the vast abundance of his fine 
scholarship, or the Elia Essays, you will find guidance 
into many of the beautiful and secluded spots in English 

literature Oi again, what countless suggestions for life- 
E 



TO 



LECTURE SECOND. 



long reading, and what wise guidance to profitable studies 
may not be found in the several works of Coleridge ! I 
mention these as eminently " guiding authors/' and it would 
be easy to add to the list others of the same class in their 
degree. This is a use of books which combines healthful 
independence of judgment with healthful reverence for 
authority, giving safety from the two extremes — careless- 
ness and servility of opinion. 

It affords a communion of thought which is, in some 
respects, better than mere formal criticism. It is free 
from some of the temptations of such criticism, which we 
must be careful not to use too much of, in these times of 
many reviews and magazines, and when we turn to them 
for guidance, we must shun as a pestilence, all heartless 
criticism, all uncongenial criticism, such especially as un- 
imaginative handling of subjects of imagination, and all 
malignant criticism. The criticism, which may well be 
followed and commenced with is that of which it has 
been said, " It may almost be called a religious criticism, 
for it holds out its warnings when multitudes are mad ; 
and there is a criticism founded upon patient research 
'and studious deliberation, which, even if it be given 
somewhat rudely and harshly, cannot but be useful. 
And there is the loving criticism, which explains, 
elicits, illumines ; showing the force and beauty of some 
great word or deed, which, but for the kind care of the 
critic, might remain a dead letter or ah inert fact ; teach- 
ing the people to understand and to admire what is ad- 
mirable." 

In following out the general principle presented in the 
last lecture, that literature — that which is essentially lite- 
rature in the highest sense of the term — is meant to give 



APPLICATION OF LITERARY PRINCIPLES. 



Tl 



power rather than information, and in cherishing a catho- 
licity of taste for books, it is a good practical rule to 
keep one's reading well proportioned in the two great 
divisions, prose and poetry. This is very apt to be neg- 
lected, and the consequence is a great loss of power, 
moral and intellectual, and a loss of some of the highest 
enjoyments of literature. It sometimes happens that 
some readers devote themselves too much to poetry: this 
is a great mistake, and betrays an ignorance of the true 
uses of poetical studies. When this happens, it is generally 
with those whose reading lies chiefly in the lower and 
merely sentimental region of poetry, for it is hardly pos- 
sible for the imagination to enter truly into the spirit of 
the great poets, without having the various faculties of 
the mind so awakened and invigorated, as to make a 
knowledge of the great prose writers also a necessity of 
one's nature. 

The disproportion usually lies in the other direction- 
prose reading to the exclusion of poetry. This is owing 
chiefly to the want of proper culture, for although there 
is certainly a great disparity of imaginative endowment, 
still the imagination is part of the universal mind of 
man, and it is a work of education to bring it into action 
in minds even the least imaginative. It is chiefly to the 
wilfully unimaginative mind that poetry, with all its 
wisdom and all its glory, is a sealed book. It sometimes 
happens, however, that a mind, well gifted with imagina- 
tive power, loses the capacity to relish poetry simply by 
the neglect of reading metrical literature. This is a sad 
mistake, inasmuch as the mere reader of prose cuts himself 
off from the very highest literary enjoyments; for if the 
giving of power to the mind be a characteristic, the most 



72 



LECTURE SECOND. 



essential literature is to be found in poetry, especially 
if it be such as English poetry is, the embodiment 
of the very highest wisdom and the deepest feeling 
of our English race. I hope to show in my next 
lecture, in treating the subject of our language, how 
rich a source of enjoyment the study of English verse, 
considered simply as an organ of expression and har- 
mony, may be made ; but to readers who confine them- 
selves to prose, the metrical form becomes repulsive 
instead of attractive. It has been well observed by 
a living writer, who has exercised his powers alike in 
prose and verse, that there are readers " to whom the 
poetical form merely and of itself acts as a sort of veil 
to every meaning, which is not habitually met with under 
that form, and who are puzzled by a passage occurring in 
a poem, which would be at once plain to them if divested 
of its cadence and rhythm \ not because it is thereby put 
into language in any degree more perspicuous, but because 
prose is the vehicle they are accustomed to for this par- 
ticular kind of matter, and they will apply their minds 
to it in prose, and they will refuse their minds to it in 
verse."* 

The neglect of poetical reading is increased by the very 
mistaken notion that poetry is a mere luxury of the mind, 
alien from the demands of practical life — a light and ef- 
fortless amusement. This is the prejudice and error of 
ignorance. For look at many of the strong and largely 
cultivated minds which we know by biography and their 
own works, and note how large and precious an element of 
strength is their studious love of poetry. Where could 



* Taylor's Notes from Books, p. 215. 



APPLICATION OF LITE B A RT PRINCIPLES. 73 



we find a man of more earnest, energetic, practical cast 
of character than Arnold ? — eminent as an historian, 
and in other the gravest departments of thought and 
learning, active in the cause of education, zealous in 
matters of ecclesiastical, political, or social reform ; right 
or wrong, always intensely practical and single-hearted in 
his honest zeal ; a champion for truth, whether in the his- 
tory of ancient politics or present questions of modern 
society ; and, with all, never suffering the love of poetry 
to be extinguished in his heart, or to be crowded out of 
it, but turning it perpetually to wise uses, bringing the 
poetic truths of Shakspeare and of Wordsworth to the 
help of the cause of truth ; his enthusiasm for the poets 
breaking forth, when he exclaims, " What a treat it would 
be to teach Shakspeare to a good class of young Greeks 
in regenerate Athens ; to dwell upon him line by line 
and word by word, and so to get all his pictures and 
thoughts leisurely into one's mind, till I verily think one 
would, after a time, almost give out light in the dark, 
after having been steeped, as it were, in such an atmo- 
sphere of brilliance !"* 

This was the constitution not of one man alone, but of 
the greatest minds of the race; for if our Anglo-Saxon 
character could be analyzed, a leading characteristic 
would be found to be the admirable combination of the 
practical and the poetical in it. This is reflected in all 
the best English literature, blending the ideal and the 
actual, never severing its highest spirituality from a 
steady basis of sober, good sense — philosophy and poetry 



* Arnold's Life, p. 284, (American Edition,) in a letter to Mr. Jus- 
tice Coleridge. 

7 



74 



LECTURE SECOND. 



forever disclosing affinities with each other. It was no 
false boast when it was said that " Our great poets have 
been our best political philosophers;"* nor would it be, 
to add that they have been our best moralists. The 
reader, then, who, on the one hand, gives himself wholly 
to visionary poetic dreamings is false to his Saxon blood ; 
and equally false is he who divorces himself from com- 
munion with the poets. There is no great philosopher in 
our language in whose genius imagination is not an 
active element : there is no great poet into whose charac- 
ter the philosophic element does not largely enter. This 
should teach us a lesson in our studies of English lite- 
rature. 

For the combination of prose and poetic reading, a 
higher authority is to be found than the predominant 
characteristic of the Saxon intellect as displayed in our 
literature. In the One Book, which, given for the good 
of all mankind, is supernaturally fitted for all phases of 
humanity and all conditions of civilization, observe that 
the large components of it are history and poetry. How 
little else is there in the Bible ! In the Old Testament 
all is chronicle and song, and the high-wrought poetry of 
prophecy. In the New Testament are the same elements, 
with this difference, that the actual and the imaginative 
are more interpenetrated — narrative and parable, fact and 
poetry blended in matchless harmony ; and even in the 
most argumentative portion of holy Writ, the poetic ele- 
ment is still present, to be followed by the vision and 
imagery of the Apocalypse. 

Such is the unquestioned combination of poetry and 



* Preface to Henry Taylor's Notes on Books. 



APPLICATION OF LITERARY PRINCIPLES. 



n 



prose in sacred Writ — the best means, we mjist believe, 
for the universal and perpetual good of man ; and if lite- 
rature have, as I have endeavoured to prove in the pre- 
vious lecture, a kindred character, of an agency to build 
up our incorporeal being, then does it follow that we 
should take this silent warning from the pages of Reve- 
lation, and combine in our literary culture the same ele- 
ments of the actual and the ideal or imaginative. 

But, as it is the poetic culture which is most fre- 
quently discarded, let me follow out this high authority 
in that direction. You will recall how, when it was the 
divine purpose to imprint upon the memory of the chosen 
race what should endure from generation to generation, 
the minister of the divine will was inspired to speak, not 
in the language of argument or law, but in the impas- 
sioned strains of the imagination. The last tones of that 
voice which had roused his countrymen from slavery and 
sensuality in Egypt, and cheered, and threatened, and 
rebuked them during their wanderings, which had an- 
nounced the statutes of Jehovah, had proclaimed victory 
to the obedient and judgment on the rebellious — the last 
tones, which were to go on sounding and sounding into 
distant ages, were the tones of poetry. The last inspira- 
tion which came down into the soul of Moses burst forth 
in that sublime ode which was his death-song. And why 
was this ? "It shall come to pass," are the words, 
" when many evils and troubles are befallen them, that 
this song shall testify against them as a witness, for it 
shall not be forgotten out of the mouth of their seed." 
Well ma} T we conceive how, in after times, when Israel 
was hunted by the hand of Midian into caves and dens— 
when, smitten by the Philistine, the ark of God was 



76 LECTURE SECOND. 

snatched away — when, after Jerusalem had known its 
highest glory, the sword of the King of the Chaidees 
smote their young men in the sanctuary, and spared 
neither young man nor maiden, old man nor him that 
stooped for age, or when the dark-browed Israelite was 
wandering in the streets of Nineveh or Babylon, an 
exile and a slave, — how must there have arisen on his sad 
spirit the memory of that song, with its sublime images 
of God's protection, now forfeited, " as an eagle stirreth 
up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad 
her wings, so the Lord alone did lead him, and there was 
no strange god with him I" 

I know that there is a way in which some people turn a 
deaf ear to this, saying that it is Oriental imagery, an 
Asiatic fashion of speech. Yes, but none the less, in the 
all-foreseeing purposes of Him who inspired it, was it 
meant for all after time and all after generations of men — 
in the West no less than in the East. The ancient and the 
Hebrew song had a modern and a larger destiny ; it was to 
pass into a body of English words, and so come unto us. 

This proof of the value of poetic culture is fortified 
when you reflect how that which may be reverenced as 
the very ideal of poetry — I mean that which flowed from 
direct divine inspiration — has always proved its adaptation 
to the hearts of men in all ages, in the Christian as well 
as in the Jewish church, in all their conditions of joy 
and of woe. The Holy City was given over to the fear- 
ful fulfilment of prophecy by the bloody sword of the 
Chaldean and the Roman — its temple and town razed to 
the ground, to be for a weary length of centuries trodden 
on by the infidel foot of the Saracen ; and yet the sounds 
that issued from the harp of Jerusalem's king, silenced in 



APPLICATION 



OF LITERARY PRINCIPLES. 



T7 



the desecrated city, have never been hushed elsewhere, 
but to this day are heard, and their never-ending echoes 
will rise up to heaven from every side of the round earth 
as long as this planet of ours shall roll glittering in the 
sunlight through the boundless spaces of the sky. And 
thus it is that in all true worship there is incorporated 
forever the large influence of imagination. 

Now, I have spoken of the combination of the practical 
and the poetical as a character of our English race, of the 
greatest English minds, and above all, as observable in 
Holy Writ; and such authority might be all-sufficient; 
but let us further seek a reason why this combination 
should be cherished, and prose and poetry studied in well- 
adjusted proportion. I speak of them as distinct, but let 
it be remembered that they are not contra-distinguished, 
for the best prose and the best poetry are but varied forms 
of uttered wisdom. The perfection of a literature is in the 
true combination of its poetry and prose, which bear to 
each other a relation which has been imaged with equal 
truth and fancy in these simple stanzas : 

I looked upon a plain of green 

That some one called the land of prose, 

Where many living things were seen 
In movement or repose. 

I looked upon a stately hill, 

That well was named the mount of song, 

Where golden shadows dwelt at will, 
The woods and streams among. 

But most this fact my wonder bred, 

Though known by all the nobly wise-— 

It was the mountain streams that fed 
The fair green plain's amenities.* 



* Anonymous. — "Poetry, Past and Present," p. 194. 



78 LECTURE SECOND. 

The prose literature leads us along into the region of 
actual truth, that which has manifested itself in action, in 
deeds, in historic events, in biographic incidents. It 
tells us what men have done, and said, and suffered, or it 
reasons on the capacity for action and for passion, and so 
it gives power to the mind, in making us the better know 
ourselves and our fellow-beings. But most inadequate are 
his conceptions of truth, who thinks it has no range beyond 
the facts and outward things which observation and re- 
search and argument ascertain. Beneath all the visible 
and audible and tangible things of the world's history, 
there lies the deeper region of silent, unseen, spiritual 
truth — -that which was shadowed forth in action, and yet 
the action, which to some minds seems every thing, is but 
the- shadow, and the spirit is the reality. The experience 
of any one's own mind may teach the inadequacy of mere 
actual truth : has not every one felt, at the time when any 
deep emotion stirred him, or any lofty thought animated 
him, what imperfect exponents of such emotion or thought, 
his words or actions are ? Nay, the more profound and sacred 
the affection, how it shrinks from any outward shape, as 
too narrow and superficial for it ! Is it not in your daily 
consciousness to recognise the presence of emotions, 
yearnings, aspirations of your spiritual nature, which 
baffle expression, even if you wished to bring them forth 
from the recess of silence — motions of the soul, which word 
nor deed do justice to? Do you not know that there are 
sympathies, affinities with our fellow-beings, and with the 
external world of sight and sound, which pass beyond the 
reach of argument or common speech ? So true is it, that 
there are powers, 



APPLICATION OF LITERARY PRINCIPLES. 79 



" That touch each other to the quick — in modes 
Which the gross world no sense hath to perceive, 
No soul to dream of."* 

This whole range of subjects, of deepest moment in the 
science of humanity , belongs to the imaginative portion 
of literature, toward which the prose literature is always 
tending, whenever it approaches the deep and spiritual 
and mysterious parts of human nature. When Mr. Lock- 
hart, at the conclusion of his admirable biography of 
Sir Walter Scott, devotes a chapter to a delineation of 
Scott's character, with all his familiarity with his subject 
and his powers as an author, he prefaces his attempt with 
this remark : " Many of the feelings common to our 
nature can only be expressed adequately, and some of the 
finest can only be expressed at all, in the language of art, 
and more especially in the language of poetry."-|" When 
Arnold, in his History of Rome, portrays the character of 
Scipio, and especially that deep religious spirit in it 
which baffled the ancient historians — feeling the inade- 
quacy of his effort in dealing with character, which, like 
Scipio' s and the Protector Cromwell's, " are the wonders of 
history/' he adds, " the genius which conceived the in- 
comprehensible character of Hamlet would alone be able 
to describe with intuitive truth the character of Scipio, or 
of Cromwell. "J Now observe how two authors, of the 
finest powers in these two high departments — biography 
and history — after carrying those powers to the farthest, 
profess their sense of how much remains unaccomplished ; 
and, moreover, their conviction that all of higher or deepei 
achievement which lies beyond is left to poetry, or left to 



* Wordsworth's " Address to Kilchum Castle," collective ed. p. 242. 
f Lockhart's Scott, vol. x. p. 22. J History of Rome, vol. iii. p. 385. 



So 



LECTURE SECOND. 



silence; not that it is less true or less real, but because 
there is truth which prose can never reach to — truth to 
which a form can be given only by imagination and art, 
whether using the instrument of words, the pencil, or the 
chisel — -the hand of poet, of painter, or of sculptor. We 
ought to remember, then, that when we let imaginative 
studies drop out of our habits of reading, we neglect a 
whole region of truth and reality which the highest prose 
authority acknowledges itself unequal to. 

The propensity to partial prose reading is attended with 
further loss, inasmuch as it not only separates us from 
much of the highest truth human nature can hold com- 
munion with, but it makes one lose the finest and deepest- 
reaching discipline our spiritual being is capable of. Two 
thousand years ago, the great philosopher of criticism gave 
his well-known theory of tragic poetry, that it purifies our 
feelings through terror and pity. But in the large com- 
pass of its power, poetry employs also other and kindlier 
agencies of good. It deals with us in the spirit of the 
most sagacious morality : it does not single out this or that 
faculty, and tutor the one till it grows weary or stubborn, 
or stupid under the narrow teaching and the dull itera- 
tion, but it addresses good sense, (which true poetry is 
never heedless of,) the intellect, the affections, and what 
has been well called "the great central power of imagina- 
tion, which brings all the other faculties into harmonious 
action/** Instead of ministering to the mind diseased or 
the mind enfeebled one drug, or hard, unvaried food, it 
carries poor suffering humanity to the seaside, or up to 
the mountain-tops, for the larger contemplation whicb 

* TalfourcVs Literary Sketches and Letters, being the Final Me- 
morials of Charles Lamb, p. 255. 



APPLICATION OP LITERARY PRINCIPLES. 



81 



leads to infinity, and for the health and strength and life 
of sublimer and purer thoughts and feelings. Were it 
possible to fathom the mystery which dwells in the serious 
eyes of infancy, we should learn, I believe, that nature 
leads the young spirit on to its sense of truth through 
wonderment and faith ; and we do know how the imagina- 
tion of childhood puts forth its powers into the region of 
the marvellous, the distant, the shadowy, and the infinite, 
— Robinson Crusoe's lonely island, the Arabian wonders, 
fairy fictions, fables without the "morals," which are 
skipped with better wisdom than they were put there, or 
travels in far-off lands. These things wear away as the 
work of life comes on, and, unhappily, the loving, faithful, 
imaginative spirit wears away too. The imagination is 
suffered to grow torpid, instead of being cultivated into a 
wiser activity, and our souls become materialized and so- 
phisticated. There is enough in life to make us practical, 
but what we more need is to study how to be wisely vision- 
ary, to carry the freshness and feelings of childhood (and 
this has been said to be a characteristic of genius) into 
the mature reason, for 

We live by admiration, hope, and love ; 
And, even as these are well and widely fixed, 
In dignity of being, we ascend. 

Excursion, collective ed. — 587. 

This is the poetic process of our spiritual growth, and when 
the poet teaches or chastens, he, at the same time, elevates 
and brings forth into life and light all of great and good 
that lies hidden in our nature. "Wouldst thou," says 
that earnest but rigid writer, Carlyle, " plant for eternity, 
then plant into the deep, infinite faculties of man his 
fantasy and heart ; wouldst thou plant for year and day, 
then plant into his shallow, superficial faculties, his self- 



82 



LECTURE SECOND. 



love, and arithmetical understanding."* The poet's planting 
is the deep planting, and his teaching becomes a ministry 
within our inmost being, so that the oracle without and the 
response within are in marvellous unity. It is not like the 
lessons which, remaining outward to us and unrecognised 
by our deep sympathies, are easily intercepted by chance 
or blown away from us, but it is made part of our very 
life and taste, to give perpetual strength or welcome warn- 
ing. I would rather a child of mine should know and 
feel the high, imaginative teachings of Wordsworth's 
" Ode to Duty" than any piece of uninspired prose 
morality in the language, because the heart that will 
truly take that lofty lesson unto itself, however it may 
falter with frailty or fall short in the fulfilment, will fain 
not cast it out ; it is teaching, that tempers the pride and 
wilfulness of manhood, showing how much more of 
moral beauty and strength and happiness there is in the 
spirit of willing obedience than in that of power or of 
liberty ; nay, that the only genuine liberty is that which 
is in harmony with law and self-control; it is teaching 
fitted to give to womanhood a star-like life and motion, 
obedient to her orbit, and kindling the firmament of hu- 
manity with bright and benignant influences, radiant from 
that orbit alone ; for the poet, better than the prose 
moralist, by throwing the consecration of his art around 
the sense of duty, discloses its hidden power for suffering 
or for action, so that, if need be, the woman will bow, 
like " the gentle lady married to the Moor," beneath the 
doom of some dark tragedy of home, or, if man's wrongs 



* Sartor Resartus, p. 228. Am. Ed. 



APPLICATION OF LITERARY PRINCIPLES. 



S3 



or his omissions should call her to other duties — for what a 
woman ought to do often depends on what man does or 
leaves undone — she will go forth, like Imogen, for wo- 
manly well-doing in the rude places of the open and 
unroofed world. 

When that accomplished lady, whose genius, with no 
ther instruments than the poet's text and her own voice, 
so finely illustrated the genius of Shakspeare, read in a 
neighbouring city, to an audience of teachers, some selec- 
tions of English literature, she gave that eloquent tribute 
to the character of Washington, which occurs in the his- 
torical lectures of Professor Smyth, of the English Uni- 
versity of Cambridge,* and also Wordsworth's Ode to 
Duty, to which I have made allusion. I was struck with 
I will not say the felicity of the choice, but with the 
wisdom of it — the one selection portraying the might and 
glory of duty as actualized in the life of the moral hero 
of modern times; the other showing them idealized by 
the imagination of the poet. I refer to this as an admi- 
rable combination of the deep teachings of prose and 
poetry. 

In order to receive the true benefit of the discipline 
of poetry, and also the full enjoyment of it, there must 
be given to it much more of thought, of strenuous 
activity of the reader's own imagination, more caution 
}f mind, than most people think it worthy of. It must 
be studied, and not merely read. There are some books 
which I wish to commend to you with a view to the 
proper culture and discipline of the imagination. I will 



* Smith's Lectures, vol. ii. p. 486. 



84 



LECTURE SECOND. 



take occasion to give an opportunity to those who desire 
to do so to take a note of them, on the next evening, 
before I proceed to the lecture for that evening; — the 
subject of which will be "The Study of the English 
Language, considered as a source of enjoyment from its 
powers in prose and verse." 



LECTURE III. 



%j\t ®trglxs|j language.* 

Medium of ideas often forgotten — Witchery of English words — Analy- 
sis of good style difficult — The power of words — Our duty to the Eng- 
lish language—Lord Bacon's idea of Latin — Milton — Hume's ex- 
postulation with Gibbon — Daniel's Lament — Extension of English 
language — French dominion in America — Landor's Penn and Peter- 
borough — Duty of protecting and guarding language — Degeneracy 
of language and morals — Age of Charles II. — Language part of cha- 
racter — Arnold's Lectures on Modern History — Use of disproportion- 
ate words — Origin of the English language in the North — Classical 
and romantic langaages — Saxon element of our language — Its su- 
periority — The Bible idiom — Structure of sentences — Prepositions 
at the end of most vigorous sentences — Composite sentences, and 
the Latin element — Alliteration — Grandeur of sentences in old 
writers — Modern short sentences — Junius — Macaulay — No peculiar 
poetic diction — Doctor Franklin's rules — Shakspeare's matchless 
words — Wordsworth's sonnet — Byron — Landor — Coleridge's Chris- 
tabel— "The Song in the Mind"— Hood— The Bridge of Sighs. 

The subject which I propose for this evening's lecture 
is the study of the powers of the English language in 
prose and verse. My desire to say something on this sub- 
ject has been prompted by the conviction that some atten- 
tion to it will increase our enjoyment of books, and will in 
fact give the reader a superadded pleasure. In our reading, 
we are very apt to content ourselves with the reception of 
such thoughts and feelings as pass into our minds from 
the silent page, unheeding the medium through which 



F 



* January 17, 1850. 

8 



86 



LECTURE THIRD, 



they reach us; indeed, often, the purer and more excellent 
the style, the less conscious are we of its merits, so trans- 
parently does it let the writer's thoughts and emotions 
pass through it. We think of what is said or written, 
and feel it, but not how it is said or written : while the 
power which an author's meaning has upon our minds is 
intimately blended with the power his language exercises 
over us, of the latter we scarce have a conscious recog- 
nition. Does not every one know how differently the same 
thing said in different ways affects us ? We welcome it, per- 
haps, in one case, and we repel it in the other. There 
shall be in one man's language an air of truth, of earnest- 
ness, and reality, which will gain assent to what he tells 
us, while the same thing told in other words will sound 
vain and unreal. There is wondrous agency of power and 
beauty in language, a winning witchery in words — grandly 
and beautifully so in our English speech. I desire to 
consider some of the elements of this, regarded as a 
source of intellectual enjoyment. In all intercourse with 
the best writers, whether in prose or verse, our minds have, 
no doubt, an unconscious perception of the goodness of the 
style, just as we have unconscious freedom of breath in a 
pure atmosphere ; but if the perception of style be made 
reflecti\e, it may come to have too much of consciousness 
in it : we may come to think too much of the instrument, 
and too little of the music; to be too critical of our own 
emotions of delight. I have, therefore, some apprehen- 
sions that in attempting any thing like an analytical expo- 
sition of the enjoyment of language, considered simply as 
an organ of expression, it may prove a little too much like 
parsing our pleasure. The happy, healthful-breathing 
asks for no analysis of the air; the mountain-spring is 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



87 



quaffed without thought of what science can tell of its 
components. In treating the powers of the English lan- 
guage in prose and verse, I should like, without vexing it 
with comment, or criticism, or analysis, but simply sound- 
ing it, to show what an instrument it has been in the 
hands of its great masters. 

I wish, however, to accomplish something more. At 
the same time, on an occasion like this, and within the 
limits of one lecture, it would not be practicable to enter 
into technical details of either th-e history or the philology 
of our language. I propose, therefore, to give a didactic 
character to this lecture, rather by making it suggestive 
of the interest which is to be found in the study of the 
language, by noticing some of its characteristics, and the 
applications of the philosophy of language which it serves 
to illustrate. Avoiding technical and recondite points of 
philology, I aim at treating the subject according to the 
universality of the interest it has, so as to show how 
the culture of it comes home to everybody, and how it is 
in the power of each one of us to awaken it into moro 
action. 

The history of the language, its origin and progress, the 
principles of English philology, and the laws of English 
metre, are subjects of deep interest and demand careful 
study, and a different kind of attention from what I have 
any right to ask from you. I propose, therefore, rather 
to notice and exemplify some of the leading characteristics 
of the language, so as to awaken into more active and in- 
telligent consciousness our enjoyment of it, so as to form 
this, among our other habits of reading; to have an eye 
and a feeling for the fitness of the words, their power, 
their beauty, their simplicity, and truthfulness; to find 



88 



LECTURE THIRD. 



ourselves, in reading a wise and good book, often pausing, 
in silent thankfulness and delight, as we think and feel 
what glorious apparel the author's wise thought or good 
feeling hath arrayed itself in — with what majesty or loveli- 
ness of speech or song the mind makes music for itself in 
the words in which it is embodied — so that the thought 
and the words receive strength and beauty from each 
other. Of that connection which exists between our 
thoughts and feelings, and the words we clothe them in, 
of their mutual relation and reaction, I cannot now speak 
further, than to say that the more we reflect on our own 
inner nature, and on the wondrous powers of words, the 
better we shall feel and understand that relation, perceiv- 
ing how words seem to dwell midway between the corpo- 
real and incorporeal — a connection between our spiritual 
and material being. 

The simple suggestion of this deep significancy of lan- 
guage, and its relation to man's spiritual nature, may per- 
haps, in some measure, correct, or, at least, startle that 
error of looking upon this whole subject as a mere mat- 
ter of rhetoric and grammar, a superficial study of style, 
and therefore having claim upon the rhetorician rather 
than on the man — on art rather than on humanity, not 
reflecting on the divine origin of language ; that speech, 
even more than reason, distinguishes man from the brute ; 
and that the two powers, in their mysterious union, lift 
him out of barbarism. Whatever it may be, whether the 
rude and imperfect speech of the savage, articulate words 
with no help of written language, or whether it be the 
copious and refined language of civilized nations, there if*, 
all the earth over, the duty of loyalty, thoughtful loyalty 
if possible, to the mother-tongue. 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



n 



The universal duty rests on us, and let us see what 
special obligations are due to our English speech. That 
speech runs the career of the race that uses it, and the 
speed and the spread of that career have, perhaps, had 
more help from the speech than philosophy has dreamed 
of. Little more than two hundred years ago, Lord 
Bacon, speaking of his Essays, said, u I do conceive that 
the Latin volumes of them, being in the universal lan- 
guage, may last as long as books last." He seems to 
have had no such assurance for his insular English lan- 
guage. Somewhat later, it needed Milton's filial and 
loyal affection for his mother-tongue to give it a share 
with the Latin in his prose-writings.* A poet, a con tern - 

* As recently as the middle of the last century, Hume expostu- 
lated with Gibbon on his use of the French instead of the Eng- 
lish language: "Why/* said he to him, "why do you compose in 
French, and carry fagots to the wood, as Horace says with regard to 
those Romans who wrote in Greek? I grant that you have a like 
motive to those Romans, and adopt a language more generally dif- 
fused than your own native tongue ; but have you not remarked the 
fate of those two ancient languages in following ages ? The Latin, 
though then less celebrated and confined to more narrow limits, has, 
in some measure, outlived the Greek, and is now become generally 
understood by men of letters. Let the French, therefore, triumph in 
the present diffusion of their tongue. Our solid and increasing esta- 
blishments in America, where ice need less dread the inundation of bar- 
barians, promise a superior stability and duration to the English 
language." — Burton's Life of Hume, vol. ii. p. 411. H. R. 

Yet Hume, in the second edition of his " History of the Stuarts/' 
expunged the following passage. Speaking of America, he had said, 
" The seeds of many a noble state have been sown in climates kept 
desolate by the wild manners of its ancient inhabitants, and an 
asylum (is) secured in that solitary world for liberty and science, 
if ever the spreading of unlimited empire or the inroad of barbarous 
nations should again extinguish them in this turbulent and restlesc 
hemisphere." — Id, vol. ii. p. 74. W. 3. R. 



§0 



LECTURE THIRD. 



porary and friend of Shakspeare, feelingly lamented the 
limits of the English language : 

" Oh that the Ocean did not bound our style 
Within these strict and narrow limits so, 
But that the melody of our sweet isle 
Might now be heard to Tiber, Arne, and Po, 
That they may know how far Thames doth outgo 
The music of declined Italy!"* 

Such was the lament of him, the purity and simplicity 
of whose style won for him the title of the " well-Ian- 
guaged Daniel." In one mood, he speaks of England as 

" This little point, this scarce-discovered isle, 
Thrust from the world, with whom our speech unknown 
Made never traffic of our style." 

Again, however, with truer and more hopeful vision, he 
exclaims, 

— " Who knows whither we may vent 

The treasure of our tongue ? To what strange shores 

This gain of our best glory will be sent 

T' enrich unknowing nations with our stores ? 

What worlds in the yet unformed Occident 

May come refined with th' accents that are ours?" 

This was the poet's vision, larger than even the imagina- 
tive reason of the philosopher Bacon counted on. This 
was not three centuries ago, and now the Island-lan- 
guage girdles the earth. Soon after the poet's heart 
gave forth its hope, English words began to find a 
home in the West, close begirt, however, with the fierce 
discords of the Indian-tongues : for years and years 
their home was hemmed in within a narrow strip along 
the Atlantic, the English and the French languages hav- 



* Dedication of Cleopatra to the Countess of Pembroke. 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



91 



ing a divided sway, when the Bourbon was strong enough 
to hold the Canadas, and proud enough to adventure 
that magnificent scheme of colonial dominion which was 
to stretch from the St. Lawrence to the Ohio and the 
Mississippi, leaving the Briton his scant foothold between 
the mountains and the sea. The might of the race broke 
this circumscription; and, in our own day, we have seen 
this language of ours span the continent, and now it 
gives a greeting on the shores of the Pacific as well as 
of the Atlantic. An earnest English author does not 
fear to predict that the time will come when the language 
will occupy the far South on each side the Andes; Bio, 
and Valparaiso, holding rivalry in the purity of the Eng- 
lish speech.* But, without venturing into the uncertain- 
ties of the future, see how our language has an abode, 
far and wide, in the islands of the earth, and how, in 
India, it has travelled northward till it has struck the 
ancient but abandoned path of another European lan- 
guage — one of the great languages of the world's history 
— the path of conquest along which Alexander carried 
Greek words into the regions of the Indus. 



* In Landor's Imaginary Conversations, written some twenty 
years ago, William Penn is made to say, " Whenever I see a child 
before me in America, I fancy I see a fresh opening in the wilder- 
ness, and in the opening, a servant of God, appointed to comfort and 
guide me, ready to sit beside me when my eyes grow dim, and able 
to sustain me when my feet are weary. Look forward, and behold 
the children of that child. Few generations are requisite to throw 
upon their hinges the heavily-barred portals of the vast continent . • . 
Who knows but a century or two hence we may look down together 
on those who are journeying in this newly-traced road toward the cities 
and marts of California, and who are delayed upon it by meeting 
the Spaniards driven in troops from Mexico ?" H. B. 



92 



LECTU11E THIRD. 



Our language at this day has a larger extent of influ- 
ence than the Greek, the Latin, or the Arabic ever had, 
and its dominion is expanding. 

When we contemplate the spread of the language, we 
may conceive the vast power which is coupled with it and 
we should remember that, commensurate with the power 
is the responsibility, the duty of cultivating and guarding 
it as a possession and inheritance, and a trust. Reflect, too, 
upon this, that along with national or individual degrada- 
tion, there is sure to come corruption of the language — 
an accompaniment more than a mere consequence of that 
degradation. The language was vitiated — worse then than 
ever — when the court of Charles the Second scattered the 
poison of its licentionsness and ribaldry. The wicked 
and debased, who are banded together in the fellowship 
of crime, disown the common language of their fellow- 
men, and delight in a strange vocabulary of their own ; 
for when they break bond with the moral elements that 
link them to society, they cast off the language as one of 
the links. Words which serve the wise and good become 
to the silly and the sensual a burden, because they are 
associated with wise and good uses, such as couple our 
English speech with so much good sense, lofty imagin- 
ings, deep philosophy, ministrant in the cause of free- 
dom, of duty, and of truth. Hence it has been well 
said that "A man should love and venerate his native 
language as the first of his benefactors, as the awaken er 
and stirrer of all his thoughts, the frame and mould and 
rule of his spiritual being ; as the great bond and medium 
of intercourse with his fellows ; as the mirror in which he 
sees his own nature, and without which he could not even 
commune with himself; as the image in which the wisdom 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



93 



of God has chosen to reveal itself to him."* And it is 
a deep feeling of the perpetual power of the associations 
of our language, which prompts the poet's words 

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue 
That Shakspeare spake. 

Now how is the language to be guarded and cultivated ? 
By the thoughtful and conscientious use of it by every 
one who speaks it. It is not by authors alone, but by each 
man and woman to whom it is the mother-tongue, that 
the language is to be preserved in its purity and power; 
by each one in his sphere and according to his opportu- 
nities. This is a duty, and the fulfilment of it is of 
deeper moment than many are aware of. It is not enough 
thought of, that " accuracy of style is near akin to vera- 
city and truthful habits of mind," and to sincerity and 
earnestness of character.*)* (i Language," observes a great 
master of it — " Language is part of man's character."! 
You may, I believe, easily prove the truth of this by 
familiar observation, discovering the physiognomy that is 
in speech as well as in the face. You will find one man's 
words are earnest of sincerity, straightforwardness of 
character, fair dealing, genuine and deep feeling, true 
manliness, true womanliness, symbolized in the words. 
You will perceive in another man's speech signs of 
a confused habit of thought, of vagueness and indi- 
rectness of purpose. What before was a beautiful ana 
transparent atmosphere, through which earthly objects 

* Guesses at Truth, Part i. p. 296. 
f Coleridge's Literary Remains, vol. i. p. 241. 
X Landor's Imaginary Conversations. First Series. Demoftneues 
and Euhulides, vol. i. p. 232. 



94 



LECTURE THIRD. 



could be distinctly seen, or the stars were brightly shilling, 
is turned into murkiness and mist. Again, there are men 
whose words, volubly uttered and with ample rotundity 
of sound, come to us like sounds, and nothing more, sug- 
gesting the unreality and hollowness of the speaker's 
character ; and sometimes, too, to the thoughtful observer, 
the falsity of character will betray itself in the fashion 
of the speech. Dr. Arnold, in his Lectures introductory 
to Modern History, (the best guide-book in our language 
to historical reading generally, *) has shown how we must 
judge of an historian's character by his style. "If it is 
very heavy and cumbrous, it indicates either a dull man 
or a pompous man, or at least a slow and awkward man ; 
if it be tawdry and full of commonplaces enunciated with 
great solemnity, the writer is most likely a silly man ; if 
it be highly antithetical and full of unusual expressions, 
or artificial ways of stating a plain thing, the writer is 
clearly an affected man. If it be plain and simple, always 
clear, but never eloquent, the writer may be a very sensi- 
ble man, but is too hard and dry to be a very great man. 
If on the other hand, it is always eloquent, rich in illus- 
trations, and without the relief of simple and great pass- 
ages, we must admire the writer's genius in a very high 
degree, but we may fear that he is too continually excited 
to have attained to the highest wisdom, for that is ne- 
cessarily calm. In this manner the mere language of an 



* Mr, Reed's edition of Arnold's Lectures, with notes, appeared in 
America in 1845 ; and for the memory of that remarkable man he 
felt and expressed — as will be often seen in these Lectures — an almost 
filial respect. Some of the happiest hours of the last months of Mr. 
Reed's life were passed at Foxhow, in the society of Mrs. Arnold, her 
children, and grandcnildren. W. B. R. 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



95 



historian will furnish us with something of a key to his 
mind, and will tell us, or at least give us cause to pre- 
sume, in what his main strength lies, and in what he is 
deficient/' The same method of observation, let me add, 
will not ^infrequently furnish us with a key to the cha- 
racters of other authors beside the historians, and also 
of men and women who are not authors, but our ordinary 
companions in life. 

According to this view of the subject, the first study 
of style begins not with the words, as the tongue articu- 
lates them or the hand writes them, but it begins here, 
at the heart, and works upward and outward from that. 
The philosophy and art of language come afterward. 
Supposing the moral qualifications to exist — I mean sin- 
cerity, truthfulness, freedom from affectation or vanity, 
earnestness — then in the next place it is important to 
associate a certain conscientiousness in the use of speech, 
so that it shall correspond to something within us. I do 
not mean that we are to sacrifice the naturalness of speech 
to a perpetual pedantry j that we should be ambitious of 
being such rigid purists as to break the liberty and spirit 
of a living language by the weight of too much authority; 
that we should fetter the easy grace of colloquial speech 
with sad formality, as Charles Lamb complains of in the 
conversation of the Scotch, when he said, " Their affirma- 
tions have the sanctity of an oath." But there may be 
somewhat more of heed in our use of language than we 
do pay to it, without running into any thing so odious as 
pedantry ; and indeed cultivated conversation not unfre- 
quently turns to these topics of language, and in a casuaL 
and familiar way will treat them most agreeably and intelli- 
gently, so that we may correct an inaccuracy of diction o^ 



LECTURE THIRD. 



of pronunciation, which we might have remained uncon- 
scious of, but for an interchange of views in such com- 
panionship. In this way, we may do much for one another 
by a fellowship of loyalty to the language. 

Besides the vice of using words without thoughts or 
feelings to correspond to them, there is another fault which 
would be chastened by a little more conscientiousness in 
our expressions; I mean a propensity very common— some- 
what more so, perhaps, to one sex (I will not say which) 
than the other — to employ words of force disproportionate 
to the occasion, especially in the expression of feelings 
either agreeable or the reverse. Something which is 
simply pleasing is described as " delightful" or " charm- 
ing ;" or that which is disagreeable or unsightly or dis- 
cordant, is spoken of as " dreadful," " terrible," " horri- 
ble," or " awful."* This, no doubt, is often merely the 
exaggeration of innocent exuberance of spirits, and the 
words are received, therefore, with large allowances. It 
in some measure comes of poverty or carelessness of 
speech, or both, somewhat in the way that oaths are 
uttered sometimes, (we may charitably believe,) not as a 
purposed profanity, but for lack of words that are strong 
without the stain of wickedness upon them. But besides 
being alien from accuracy and a truthful habit of mind, 
the habitual use of disproportioned language is attended 
with this disadvantage, our strong words are all wasted 
before they are wanted ; if, for instance there comes an 
occasion calling for deep and hearty hatred, and also for 



* In another relation, one sees the constant misuse of this word, in 
its strict employment by Barrow, when he speaks of " a devout affection 
of heart, an aiveful sense of mind." Barrow, vol. v. p. 605. W. B. R. 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



97 



an earnest expression of it, our vocabulary is exhausted ; 
our armory is despoiled by our own extravagance ; we 
have been shooting our arrows in the air, and when we 
truly need them, our quiver is empty.* 

Let us now look at some of the characteristics of the 
English language as an instrument of expression for 
those who recognise the duty of the thoughtful use of it. 
He will the better understand and use it who keeps in 
mind that it belongs to the family of the Northern lan- 
guages. Our English speech is to be traced beyond 
England into the forests of Germany and to the shores 
of the Northern Ocean ; the dialect, that was in time to 
grow into our English language, was carried fourteen hun- 
dred years ago to the island from the Teutonic region of the 
continent, f Our speech holds not its genealogy from the 
cultivated languages of the South ; they had done their ap- 
pointed work — the languages of Greece and Rome — and 
the English language, for the fulfilment of its destiny, had 
another birth, and was long kept aloof from them. It was 
to have a fresher and purer spring than in the languages 



* There is an opposite fault, which we have caught from England, 
but which an English writer, mindful of the language, has con- 
demned "as that stupid modern vulgarism, by which we use the word 
' nice' to denote almost every mode of approbation for almost every 
variety of quality, . . . from sheer poverty of thought," or fear of 
" saying any thing definite." Julius Charles Hare, Philological Mu- 
seum. H. R. 

f It was a slow and various transmission which carried the lan- 
guage which was to grow into modern English over from the conti- 
nent to the island ; for there are reckoned six several migrations of 
different divisions of the Saxon race, extending through almost ex- 
actly a century, bearing with them their various dialects for future 
formation into one great language. H. R. 

9 



98 



LECTURE THIRD 



which were identified with the degeneracy of the nations 
that spoke them. It was to become the voice of another 
form of national character, and of a different and deeper 
spirituality, than that which belonged to the sunny re- 
gions of the south. The contrast between what has been 
called the "classical mind" and the "romantic mind/' is 
traceable in the respective languages, and has been beau- 
tifully illustrated by the names of " good omen/' which 
the Greeks delighted in, and the names of " dark mys- 
tery/' which were congenial to those who dwelt in the 
gloom of the North. 

The sunny wisdom of the Greeks 

All o'er the earth is strewed : 
On every dark and awful place, 

Rude hill and haunted wood, 
The beautiful, bright people left 

A name of omen good. 

They would not have an evil word 

Weigh heavy on the breeze ; 
They would not darken mountain side 

Nor stain the shining seas, 
With names of some disastrous past ; 

The unwise witnesses. 

* * * * 

Unlike the children of romance, 

From out whose spirit deep 
The touch of gloom hath passed on glen, 

And mountain lake and steep; 
On Devil's Bridge and Raven's Tower 

And lovelorn Maiden's Leap. 

Who sought in cavern, wood, and dell, 
Where'er they could lay bare 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



99 



The path of ill, and localized 
* Terrific legends there; 

Leaving a hoarse and pondrous name 
To haunt the very air. 

Not so the radiant-hearted Greeks, 

Who hesitated still 
To offend the blessed Presences 

Which earth and ocean fill ; 
Whose tongues, elsewhere so eloquent, 

Stammered at words of ill. 

All places, where their presence was 

Upon the fruitful earth, 
By kindly law were clasped within 

The circle of their mirth, 
And in their spirits had a new 

And consecrated birth. 

bless them for it, traveller ! 

The fair-tongued ancients bless ! 
Who thus from land and sea trod out 

All footmarks of distress ; 
Illuminating earth with their 

Own inward cheerfulness.* 

In other ways it might also be shown that the genius 
of the Northern character gave utterance to itself differ- 
ently from the races of the South. The beginning of a 
just knowledge of the English language is an accurate 
sense of its Northern origin. The date of that origin can- 
not be fixed; but certainly the language is a growth out 
of the Anglo-Saxon speech, however important may be 
the additions it has received elsewhere. Of the 38,000 
words, of which it is reckoned the English language con- 
sists, 23,000 are of Saxon origin— near five-eighths of it; 



* Faber's Styrian Lake and Other Poems, p. 318. 



}00 



LECTURE THIRD. 



a proportion which must needs control, to a great extent, 
the grammatical laws of the language; that is, along with 
the multitude of Northern words, there must be much of 
Northern method, and in that method, baffling, as it often 
does, the technical systems of grammar, we are to look for 
the idioms. It is a remark of one of the most nervous 
authors of our day, Walter Savage Landor : u Every good 
writer has much idiom ; it is the life and spirit of language ; 
and none ever entertained a fear or apprehension that 
strength and sublimity were to be lowered and weakened 
by it. . . . Nations in a state of decay lose their idiom, 
which loss is always precursory to that of freedom."* And 
Coleridge exclaimed, "If men would only say what they 
have to say in plain terms, how much more eloquent 
would they be!" But it is the simple Saxon-English 
words, and the Saxon way of putting them together, that 
people will not be content with. There is forever a push- 
ing away from the purest English, and from the genuine 
idioms; and, what is noticeable, it is the half-educated 
who are always most ambitious of long words and high- 
sounding combinations of them. There is not pomp 
enough for them in our short, often one-syllable Saxon 
speech. Observe what a propensity there is to substitute 
the word " individual," (and unfitly too) for such a clear, 
simple, short word as " man." It seems to be employed 
as a sort of midway expression between "man" and 
"gentleman " between "woman" and "lady" as if there 
was not quite courtesy enough in the words "man" and 
" woman" and a little more than was wanted in the other 



* Imaginary Conversations, First Series. Conversation xiv., vol. i 
p. 244, 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



101 



words, It is in this way that there may be a false refine- 
ment, a mistaken delicacy, that is fatal to the primitive 
simplicity and nervousness of language. From being too 
dainty in our choice of words, we come at last to forfeit 
the use of some of the best of them. Again, I do verily 
believe, that the good word "begin" is in danger of 
becoming obsolete, so that, after a while, it will sound 
quaint and antiquated; and yet it is both as old as 
the language, and as fresh as to-day's talk, known in all 
the eras of the language, sanctioned by all possible autho- 
rity, grave and formal as well as familiar and homely, and 
expressive of all that is needed. Really some people seem 
to shun it as much as if it were indelicate, or, at the least, 
a vulgarism. Listen almost where you will, and nowa- 
days nobody hardly is heard of as "beginning" for every- 
thing is " commenced." But what a shock would our 
instinct of language and some of our best associations 
receive, if this change could creep on to the pages 
of our English version of the Bible, instead of reading 
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the 
earth" — " the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wis- 
dom" — "In the beginning was the Word." Truly did 
Coleridge say, that "Intense study of the Bible will keep 
any writer from being vulgar in point of style/'* And an 
eloquent living divine has asked, "Who can estimate the 
grandeur, the depth, the expansive power, which our lan- 
guage and the German have derived from the national 
liturgical offices, as well as from the national translation 
of the Scriptures ?" Let those who crave a statelier 
word than "begin," learn that even Milton, with all hia 



G 



* Table Talk, vol. i. p. 177. 
9* 



102 



LECTUKE THIRD. 



erudite diction, never, throughout all his poems, I believe, 
uses the words "commence" or "commencement-" and let 
them observe how Shakspeare perpetually makes his 
beautiful uses of the simple English word, and is even 
content to make it shorter and simpler yet, as in the 
touching line that tells so much of the guilt-wasted soul 
of Macbeth — 

"I 'gin to grow a-weary of the sun." 
Let me exemplify this tendency away from the native 
character of the language in the structure of sentences as 
well as in the choice of words. I refer to the frequent 
abandonment of that peculiarly characteristic arrange- 
ment which puts a preposition at the end of a sen- 
tence. This is eminently an English idiom, and nothing 
but prejudice arising from misapplied analogy with the 
Southern languages, and the propensity to make style 
more formal and less idiomatic, could ever have led any 
one to suppose this construction to be wrong. The false 
fastidiousness which shuns a short particle at the end of a 
sentence, is fatal often to a force which belongs to the 
language with its primal character. The superiority of the 
idiom I am referring to, could be proved beyond question 
by examples of the best writing in all the eras of the lan- 
guage. As the error is pretty wide spread, let me cite a 
few of these. Lord Bacon says, 66 Houses are built to live 
in, and not to look on and again, " Revenge is a kind 
of wild justice, which the more a man's nature runs to, 
the more ought law to weed it out." Any attempt to 
transpose these separable prepositions would destroy the 
strength and the terseness of the sentences. Even a 
stronger example occurs in a passage in one of the great 
English divines, a contemporary of Bacon's: "Hath God 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



103 



a name to swear by ? . . . Hath God a name to curse by ? 
Hath God a name to blaspheme by ? and hath God no 
name to pray by ?"* The opening sentence of one of Mr. 
Burke's most celebrated speeches is — " The times we live 
in have been distinguished by extraordinary events;" 
Dr. Franklin's phrase, with its twenty -five Saxon and four 
Latin words : . . William Coleman, then a merchant's 
clerk about my age, who had the coolest, clearest head, 
the best heart, and the exactest morals of any man 
I ever met with." And observe such a sentence as this 
of Arnold's, " Knowledge must be worked for, studied 
for, thought for; and, more than all, it must be prayed 
for."f I really think that people, in writing and speak- 
ing, might get over their fear of finding a preposition at 
the end of their sentences. 

But it is not only the Saxon side of the language that is 
to be prized and cultured : its glory is, in fact, its wonder- 
fully composite character, the Anglo-Norman element, as 
well as the Anglo-Saxon, contributing to its copiousness and 
power; and there is no more pleasing study in language, 
than to observe how, in all the best writers, these elements 
are harmoniously combined. One of the boldest instances 
of this has been noticed in these lines in Macbeth, in 
which two very long words are blended with short ones 
with singular effect : 

"Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood 
Clean from my hand ? No ! this, my hand will rather 
The multitudinous sea incarnardine, 
Making the green — one red. "J 

* Donne's Sermon on the Penitential Psalms, vol. vi. p. 380. 
f Arnold's Miscellaneous Works, p. 234. On the Education of the 
Middle Classes. Also, Hallam's Literature of Europe, vol. iv. 535. 
J A less familiar line occurs to me where, at the end of a series of 



104 



LECTURE THIRD. 



A well-known line in the same tragedy reminds me of 
another antique quality which has been curiously retained, 
long after the formal practice of it has been disused, and 
now prevails peculiarly in all vigorous English prose, as 
well as poetry : I refer to the use of alliteration, as de- 
rived from some of the forms of early poetry in England. 
If you will take the pains to observe it, you will probably 
be surprised to find to what an extent it is employed in 
English literature, both now and formerly. It is a 
curious study of the language to trace the power that lies 
in the repetition of a letter in a succession of words ; as 
when Macbeth says, 

"Ay, now, I see, 'tis true: 
For the blood-boltered Banquo smiles upon me, 
And points at them for his.* 

In the versions attached to Ketseh's Outlines in French, 
Italian, Spanish, and German, no one of the languages at- 
tempts this tremendous alliteration. I cannot pause upon 
this quality of style further than to remark, that he who 
studies the language, will find an interest in observing how 
beautiful and striking, and, indeed, how natural, this ap- 
parently artificial process becomes in the hands of a master 

Saxon words, a Latin word is brought in with singular power. In 
the second part of Henry VI., Suffolk says to Queen Margaret, 

a For where thou art, there is the world itself 
"With every several pleasure in the world ; 
And where thou art not, desolation." W. B. K. 

* Or in the incantation, 

"the salt-sea shark; 
Root of hemlock digg'd ; i' the dark, 
Finger of birth-strangled babe, 
Ditch-delivered by a drab." W. B. R. 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



105 



of the language. The mere affinity of initial letters is also 
one of the mental associations which not unfrequently 
gives the fittest word to be found.* 

In describing the English language as a composite lan- 
guage, we get, perhaps, a wrong notion of its being 
made up by the union of two dialects, the Saxon and 
the Norman. The truth rather seems to be, that the 
Anglo-Saxon language has displayed the same powers of 
acquisition as have distinguished the race, and has thus 
enlarged the domain by conquest, and appropriation, and 
annexation, retaining, however, withal, its essentially Teu- 
tonic character. Its early acquisitions from abroad were 
words of French or Southern birth, which became part 
of the natural spoken language, the copiousness and 
power of which were thus admirably increased. A single 
specimen will show that this is a copiousness giving not 

* " The Northern languages," remarks Mr. Henry Taylor, (Notes 
on Books, p. 132,) "have often been reproached for their excess in 
consonanfs, guttural, sibilant, or mute, and it has been concluded, as a 
matter of course, that languages in which vowels and liquids predomi- 
nate must be better adapted to poetry, and that the most mellifluous 
language must be also the most melodious. . . This is but a rash and 
ill-considered condemnation of our native tongue. . . In dramatic verse, 
more particularly, our English combinations of consonants are in- 
valuable, not only for the purpose of reflecting grace and softness by 
contrast, or accelerating the verse by a momentary detention, but also 
in giving expression to the harsher passions, and in imparting keen- 
ness and significancy to the language of discrimination, and especially 
to that of scorn. In Shakspeare for instance, what a blast of sarcasm 
whistles through that word, " Thrift, thrift, Horatio \" with its one 
vowel and five consonants, and then how the verse runs on with a low, 
confidential smoothness, as if to give effect to the outbreak by the sub- 
sequent suppression, 

"the funeral-baked meats 
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables." H. R. 



106 



LECTURE THIRD. 



merely duplicate words ; but distinct expressions for deli- 
cate shades of meaning. The words " apt" and "fit" 
might be thought to differ only in this, that the former is 
of Latin derivation; but "apt" has an active sense, and 
"fit" a passive sense — a distinction clearly shown by 
Shakspeare, when the poisoner in the play in Hamlet 
gays, " hands apt, drugs fit" and by Wordsworth 

" Our hearts more apt to sympathize 
With heaven, our souls more fit for future glory."* . 

While the early additions to the language were fairly 
absorbed into it, and have proved so valuable, the later 
introductions of words of Latin or French formation have 
never, in like manner, become natural and national ; and 
their presence has, therefore, been often injurious as an 
element not divested of its foreign tone. 

In our reading of English prose, it is well worth while 
to study what has become almost a lost art. I mean 
what may be called the architecture, as it were, of a long 
and elaborate sentence, with its continuous and well-sus- 
tained flow of thought and feeling, and, however inter- 
woven, orderly and clear. This is to be sought chiefly in 
the great prose-writers of former centuries. "Kead that 



* The composite character of the language thus provides us with a 
large class of words not strictly synonymous, but serving to express 
the most delicate shades of meaning: we have, for instance, the 
words "feelings" and "sentiments," at first sight apparently mere du- 
plicate words; but it has been observed that there is a certain idea of 
passiveness connected with the feelings, which contrasts with the idea 
of activity in the word " sentiments," and that the former came down 
to us from the ruder and simpler Saxon, and the latter from the more 
refined and cultivated Norman. H. R. 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



107 



page," saicl Coleridge, pointing to one of them ) "you can- 
not alter one conjunction without spoiling the sense. It 
is a linked strain throughout. In your modern books, 
for the most part, the sentences in a page have the same 
connection with each other that marbles have in a bag : 
they touch without adhering."* Junius, waging his 
fierce, factious war, fought with these short, pointed sen- 
tences, piercing his foes with them ; and it has been said 
that nothing but Home Tooke and a long sentence were 
an overmatch for him ; and in our day, Macaulay, waging 
his larger and more indiscriminate war, deals so exclu- 
sively with the same fashion of speech, that if you un- 
dertake to read his history aloud your voice will crave a 
good old-fashioned, long sentence, as much as your heart 
may crave more of the repose and moderation of a deeper 
philosophy of history. This fashion of short sentences 
is mischievous, not only as a temptation to an indolent 
habit of reading, (for it asks a much less sustained atten- 
tion,) but it is fatal to the fine rhythm which English 
prose is capable of. As I cannot pause to consider espe- 
cially the nature of our prose rhythm, I will give what 



* Coleridge's Table Talk, vol ii. p. 185. 

One of the grandest long sentences in our modern English is the 
opening passage of Mr. Brougham's speech in defence of Queen 
Caroline. It extends through twenty-seven lines. If I were asked 
to select a sentence of perfect English formation, I should take the 
following from Miss SewelPs History of Greece. It dwells in my 
mind like music : 

" There is little now to be seen in the plains of Olympia but a few 
ruins of brick. The mountains stand as they did in the old times, 
and trees flourish upon them year after year, and the rivers flow in 
the same track j but all the great buildings and statues have crum- 
bled to dust, and the valley is silent and deserted." \Y. B. R. 



108 



LECTURE THIRD. 



is better, a sentence from the pen of a living divine, 
which is an example of true prose rhythm ; and all pure 
English words : 

" The land that is very far off — it can be no other than 
the heavenly country, for love of which God's elect have 
lived as strangers in the earth— a land far away, over a 
long path of many years, up weary mountains, and through 
deep broken ways, full of perils and of pit-falls; through 
sicknesses and weariness, sorrows and burdens, and the 
valley of the shadow of death; world-worn and foot-sore, 
they have been faring forth, one by one, since the world 
began, f going and weeping.'"* 

There is no appearance of art in this sentence; but 
the highest art could not more truly make choice and 
combination of its words. 

I must hasten to the powers of the language in verse ; 
and, in the first place, let me say that it is a happy trait 
in our literature that it has no peculiar poetic diction. 
Words that are used in good prose are not excluded from 
poetry, and words which the poets employ belong also to 
our prose uses of speech and writing ; and hence the 
poets are the better enabled to exert a perpetual influence 
in the fulfilment of their high function of conservators 
of the purity of the language. Our prosody, taking ac- 
cent rather than quantity for its principle, seldom if ever, 
disqualifies words on account of their sound, whereas in the 
Latin, as has been ascertained, one word out of every 
eight is excluded from its chief metres by the rules of its 
prosody. An analysis of a passage from Cicero, the ele- 
vated prose of the language, for this purpose, has proved 



* Manning's Sermons, vol. iii. p. 432. 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



109 



that, in fifty lines, thirty words are impossible words for 
the most usual forms of Latin verse. 

The study of English poetry, being in closer affinity 
with the prose, admits of an important use in the forma- 
tion of a good prose style. A mind as earnestly practi- 
cal as Dr. Franklin's observed this, and he recommended 
the study of poetry and the writing of verse for this very 
purpose : it was one of the sources of his own excellent 
English. It is a species of early training for prose- 
writing which he recommended, having recognised it in 
his own case as having given a genuine copiousness and 
command of language. This certainly is worth reflection, 
too, that all the great English poets, Chaucer, Spenser, 
Shakspeare, Milton, Dryden, Cowper, Byron, Southey, and 
Wordsworth, have displayed high power as prose-writers. 

It is sometimes supposed that the laws of metrical lan- 
guage must, of necessity, produce a style more or less 
artificial, and therefore alien from prose uses ; but the 
very opposite is the fact. The true poet is always a true 
artist, and words are the instruments of his art. The 
laws of metre are no bondage to him, but genial self-con- 
trol ; he asks less license of language than any one, and 
the constraint of rhyme will often increase and not lessen 
the precision and clearness of expression. It is, in truth, 
one of the cases which prove the great moral truth, that 
willing obedience gains for itself unwonted power : sub- 
mitting to the control of his art, bowing to its laws with 
happy loyalty, the poet's reward is the endowment of an 
ampler command of expression and of the music of the 
language. Verse and metre are wings, and not fetters, to 
the true poet. 

10 



110 



LECTURE THIRD. 



Observe the matchless English everywhere in Shaks 
peare — how free it is with all the art that is to be disco- 
vered in it; how true it is, and full of beautiful and al- 
most familiar simplicity ! If, in the recollection of any 
passage, a word shall escape your memory, you may huni 
through the thirty-eight thousand words in the language, 
and no word shall fit the vacant place but the one that 
the poet put there. Take that exquisite lament of the 
banished Norfolk over his native English : the words are 
all simple, homely words, such as anybody might use, 
(for Shakspeare never made his language " too bright or 
good for human nature's daily food.") Notice, too, 
if you can do so without impairing the general effect, 
that there are in the passage no fewer than eight alli- 
terations : 

" A heavy sentence, my most sovereign liege, 
And all unlook'd for from your highness' mouth ; 
A dearer merit, not so deep a maim 
As to be cast forth in the common air, 
Have I deserved at your highness' hand. 
The language I have learn'd these forty years, 
My native English, now I must forego : 
And now my tongue's use is to me no more 
Than an un stringed viol or a harp ; 
Or like a cunning instrument cas'd up, 
Or, being open, put into his hands, 
That knows no touch to tune the harmony. 
I am too old to fawn upon a nurse, 
Too far in years to be a pupil now." 

Or turn to those beautiful sentences in Coriolanus, where 
the Roman hero, returning with wounds and victory, 
is met by his exulting mother and his silent, weeping 
wife : 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



131 



"My gracious silence, hail! 
Would'st thou have laugh' d, had I come tomn'd home, 
That weep'st to see me triumph ? Ah, my dear, 
Such eyes the widows in Corioli wear, 
And mothers that lack sons." 

Or, to take -what is not so much used by Shakspeare, the 
rhymed poetry in Love's Labour's Lost ; 

" These earthly godfathers of heaven's lights, 
That give a name to every fixed star, 
Have no more profit of their shining nights 

Than those that walk, and wot not what they are." 

How true is it what Coleridge said, " that you might 
as well think of pushing a brick out of a wall with your 
forefinger, as attempt to remove a word out of any of the 
finished passages of Shakspeare."* 

To show the wonderful power of expression that belongs 
to poetry, under even the most severe laws of verse, what 
mere prose-writer or reader would suppose it possible, 
within the narrow limit of fourteen lines, and with all the 
complex structure and redoubled rhymes of the sonnet, 
for a poet to speak of no fewer than seven of the illus- 
trious poets of modern Europe, and to touch upon their 
characters and the story of their lives ; and yet this has 
been achieved, apparently without effort — so natural is 
the flow of the language — in that well-known sonnet of 
Wordsworth, wherein he at once defends and illustrates 
that form of composition : — 

" Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned, 
Mindless of its just honours ; with this key 
Shakspeare unlock* d his heart; the melody 
Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound ; 



* Table Talk, vol. ii., p. 211. 



112 



LECTUKE THIRD. 



A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound j 

With it Camoens soothed an exile's grief; 

The Sonnet glittered a gay myrtle-leaf 
Amid the cypress with which Dante crowned 

His visionary brow ,• a glow-worm lamp, 
It cheer'd mild Spenser, called from Faery-land 

To struggle through dark ways, and when a damp 
Pell round the path of Milton, in his hand 

The thing became a trumpet; whence he blew 

Soul-animating strains — alas, too few !" 

It is the poets who have best revealed the hidden har- 
mony that lies in our short Saxon-English words. — the 
monosyllabic music of our language. This was one of 
the secrets of the charm and the popularity of Lord 
Byron's poetry — his eminently English choice of words. 
Two short passages of Mr. Landor's Poems will serve to show 
the metrical effect of simple words of one syllable. In 
the sentence I am about to quote, out of thirty such 
words, there is but one long latinized word — the rest are 
□early all monosyllables, the last line wholly so : 

" She was sent forth 
To bring that light which never wintry blast 
Blows out, nor rain, nor snow extinguishes — 
The light that shines from loving eyes upon 
Eyes that love back, till they can see no more,"* 

The next will better exemplify the harmonious combina- 
tion of the simple English and the classical or Southern 
srords. 

"Crush thy own heart, Man ! but fear to wound 
The gentler, that relies on thee alone, 
By thee created, weak or strong by thee ; 



* Landor's Works, vol. ii. p. 480. Hellenics viii. 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



113 



Touch it not but for worship ; watch before 
Its sanctuary ; nor leave it till are closed 
The temple-doors, and the last lamp is spent." 

The combination of the various elements of the language 
will be found most abundantly illustrated in the poems of 
Milton, but from such a theme, too large for me to venture 
on now, let me pass to a few other illustrations more 
readily to be disposed of. 

The poetry of our own times has done high service to 
the language by expanding its metrical discipline, opening 
a larger freedom and variety, and yet keeping aloof from" 
mere license. Observe, for instance, in these lines, the 
effect produced at the close by a change in the structure 
of the stanza and the single long line with which, at the 
end, the imagination travels forth; 

"0! that our lives, which flee so fast, 
In purity were such, 
That not an image of the past 
Should fear that pencil's touch ! 

Retirement then might hourly look, 

Upon a soothing scene ; 
Age steal to his allotted nook, 

Contented and serene ; 

With heart as calm as lakes that sleep 

In frosty moonlight glistening ; 
Or mountain rivers, where they creep 
Along a channel smooth and deep 

To their own far-oflf murmurs listening."* 

One of the most exquisite studies of the beautiful 
freedom of English verse is to be found in that poem, the 
music of which so fascinated the spirit of Sir Walter Scott 
and of Lord Byron, as to prompt them both to some of 



* Wordsworth. 
10* 



114 



LECTURE THIRD. 



their own finest effusions; I refer to Coleritlge's Christa- 
bel, in which a variety of line and rhyme, and even blank 
verse is wrought into a marvellous unity — nowhere more 
than in that passage picturing Christabel in the forest, 
w 7 hen she hears the moaning of the witch. 

"Is the night chilly and dark! 
The night is chilly, but not dark. 
The thin gray cloud is spread on high, 
It covers but not hides the sky. 
The moon is behind, and at the full, 
And yet she looks both small and dull. 
The night is chilly, the cloud is gray, 
'Tis a month before the month of May, 
And the Spring comes slowly up this way. 
The lovely lady Christabel, 
Whom her father loves so well, 
What makes her in the woods so late, 
A furlong from the castle-gate ? 
She had dreams all yesternight 
Of her own betrothed knight : 
And she in the midnight wood will pray 
For the weal of her lover that's far away. 

She stole along, she nothing spoke, 

The sighs she heav'd were soft and lowj 

And naught was green upon the oak 
But moss and rarest mistletoe ; 

She kneels beneath the huge oak-tree, 

And in silence prayeth she. 

The lady sprang up suddenly, 

The lovely lady, Christabel! 
It moan'd as near as near can be, 

But what it is, she cannot tell; 
On the other side, it seems to be 
Of the huge, broad-breasted old oak-tree 

The night is chill, the forest bare : 
Is it the wind that moaneth bleak. 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



115 



There is not wind enough in the air 

To move away the ringlet curl 
From the lovely lady's cheek; 

There is not wind enough to twirl 
The one red leaf, the last of its clan, 
That dances as often as dance it can, 
Hanging so light, and hanging so high 
On the topmost twig that looks up to the sky. 
Hush, beating heart of Christabel I" 

There is one more principle in the study of language in 
poetic literature which I wish to notice, and that is the 
beauty of the adaptation in all true poetry of the metrical 
form to the subject and feeling of the poem. " Every 
true poet/' it has been well said, " has a song in his mind, 
the notes of which, little as they precede his thoughts — so 
little as to seem simultaneous with them — do precede, sug- 
gest and inspire many of these, modify and beautify 
them."* How this connection exists between the poet's 
thought and passion, and their apt tune in language, is 
more, perhaps, than philosophy can discover; but there is 
an interest in observing the fact * and this also is to be 
thought of, that the true poet awakens this spiritual song 
in the mind of his reader. 

Even the same form of verse is very different in the 
hands of different poets, and has great and characteristic 
variety of excellence — the blank verse of Milton, of Cow- 
per, and of Wordsworth, having each a beautiful melody 
of its own. It adds to our knowledge of our language 
and its powers, and also greatly to the cultivated enjoy- 
ment of poetical reading, if we take the pains to obsei ve 
and appreciate the harmonious relation of the measure and 



* Darley's Introduction to Beaumont and Fletcher, as quoted in 
" Chaucer Modernized," p. 48. 



116 



LECTURE THIRD. 



the subject. I will give an illustration of this relation, 
by quoting two pieces by the same poet, and then will de- 
tain you but a few minutes longer. The contrast between 
the pieces is a refined one, because in each there is an 
adaptation to deep pathos, but exquisitely varied to diffe- 
rent forms of pathos, the emotion at the aspect of death 
in its gentleness, and of death in its terrible tragedy. 

"We watched her breathing through the night, 
Her breathing soft and low, 
As in her breast the wave of life 
Kept heaving to and fro. 

So silently we seemed to speak, 

So slowly moved about, 
As we had lent her half our powers 

To eke her living out. 

Our very hopes belied our fears, 

Our fears our hopes belied; 
We thought her dying when she slept, 

And sleeping when she died. 

For when the morn came dim and sad 

And chill with early showers, 
Her quiet eyelids closed — she had 

Another morn than ours."* 

What perfect tranquillity and sense of resignation there 
is in these purely simple English words and their gentle 
flow. Turn from them to that other poem of the same 
author, " The Bridge of Sighs" — a poet's feeling rebuke 
of the vice and inhumanity of a great metropolis, and of 
sympathy with its poor, degraded victims, driven to sui- 
cide in the midnight waters of the city's river. The 
tranquil, soul-subduing music of the former piece is 



* Collected Edition of Hood's Poems, vol. ii., p. 98, and vol. i., p. 264. 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



117 



changed to a short and abrupt measure, in which the 
passions of pity, bitter anger, and grief are stirring for 
utterance. * 

It is thus in a nation's poetry (that is, of course, 
when it is really poetry of a high and worthy kind) that 
the language will be found in its highest perfection, in 
its truest cultivation; for a poet can never suffer his style 
to fall short of a well-sustained purity. It is, therefore, 
in the poetry that a language may best be studied, even 
for prose uses; that is, when any one would know to 
what state of excellence the language may be carried, he 
must look to that chiefly, but, of course, not exclusively, 
in the poetical literature. 

We are living at a period when the language has at- 
tained a high degree of excellence, both in prose and 
verse, — when it has developed largely, for all the uses 
of language, its power and its beauty. It is one of the 
noblest languages that the earth has ever sounded with ; 
it is our endowment, our inheritance, our trust. It asso- 
ciates us with the wise and good of olden times, and it 
couples us with the kindred peoples of many distant 
regions. It is our duty, therefore, to cultivate, to cherish, 
and to keep it from corruption. Especially is this a duty 
for us, who are spreading that language over such vast 
territory; and not only that, but having such growing 
facilities of intercommunication, that the language is per- 
petually speeding from one portion of the land to another 



* I have not thought it worth while to reprint at length a poem so 
familiar as the " Bridge of Sighs but those who heard this lecture 
will not easily forget the beautifu' and tearful manner — his own gontle 
nature agitated by uncontrollable sympathy — in which he recited its 
beautiful stanzas. "W. B. R, 
H 



118 



LECTURE THIRD. 



with wondrous rapidity, equally favourable to the diffu- 
sion of either purity or corruption of speech, but, cer- 
tainly, calculated to break down narrow and false provin- 
cialisms of speech. 

In the culture and preservation of a language, there 
are two principles, deep-seated in the philosophy of lan- 
guage, which should be borne in mind. One is, that 
every living language has a power of growth, of expan- 
sion, of development ; in other words, its life — that which 
makes it a living language, having within itself a power 
to supply the growing wants and improvements of a 
living people that uses it. If by any system of rules 
restraint is put on this genuine and healthful freedom, 
on this genial movement, the native vigour of the lan- 
guage is weakened. 

It may be asked whether, by this principle of the life 
of a language, it is meant that the language has no law. 
Very far from it. The other principle (and with which 
the first is in perfect harmony) is, that every language, 
living or dead, has its laws. Indeed it has been wisely 
said that, " whatever be the object of our study, be it 
language, or history, or whatsoever province of the mate- 
rial or spiritual world, we ought, in the first instance, to 
be strongly impressed with the conviction that every 
thing in it is subject to the operation of certain princi- 
ples, to the dominion of certain laws; that there is 
nothing lawless in it, nothing unprincipled, nothing insu- 
lated or capricious, though, from the fragmentary nature 
of our knowledge, many things may possibly appear so." 

Now this willing, dutiful belief in the existence of the 
laws of a language, however concealed they may be 
under apparent anomalies, will not unfrequently evolve 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 119 

some beautiful principle of speech, some admirable adap- 
tation of words to the thoughts and feelings, in what 
otherwise is, too often, carelessly and ignorantly dis- 
missed as an irregularity. Permit me to illustrate briefly 
my meaning, by an example. In expression of the future 
time, there is employed that curious mixture of the two 
verbs "shall" and "will" which is so perplexing to 
foreigners, and inexplicable, though familiar, to many who 
are to the language born. Upon this subject it has been 
observed, there is in human nature generally an inclina- 
tion to avoid speaking presumptuously of the future, 
in consequence of its awful, irrepressible, and almost 
instinctive uncertainty, and of our own powerlessness 
over it, which, in all cultivated languages, has si- 
lently and imperceptibly modified the modes of expres- 
sion with regard to it. Further, there is an instinct of 
good breeding which leads a man to veil the manifesta- 
tion of his own will, so as to express himself with be- 
coming modesty. Hence, in the use of those words, 
"shall" and "will" (the former associated with compul- 
sion, the latter with free volition,) we apply, not law- 
lessly or at random, but so as to speak submissively in 
the first person, and courteously when we speak to or of 
another. This has been a development, but not without 
a principle in it ; for, in our older writers, for instance, 
in our version of the Bible, " shall" is applied to all 
three persons. We had not then reached that stage of 
politeness which shrinks from even the appearance of 
speaking compulsorily of another. On the other hand, 
the Scotch, it is said, use "will" in the first person; that 
is, as a nation, they have not acquired that particular 



120 



LECTURE THIRD. 



shade of good-breeding which shrinks from thrusting 
itself forward. 

I have cited this theory of the English future tenses, to 
show how that which is often dismissed as a caprice — a 
freak in language — may have a law, a philosophy, a truth 
of its own, if we will but thoughtfully and dutifully look 
for it. 

In conclusion, let me say that he will gain the best 
knowledge of our language who shall seek it, not so much 
in mere systems of grammar, as in communion with the 
great masters of the language, in prose and verse. He 
will best appreciate and admire this English language of 
ours — our mother-speech — who learns that the genius 
of it is as far removed from mere lawlessness, on the one 
hand, as from any narrow set of rules which would cramp 
it to what has been called " grammar-monger's language." 
In the variety of our idioms, the free movement of the 
language, there is, as in the race that speaks it, Saxon 
freedom — freedom that is not license, but law. 



LECTUEE IV. 



®arlg (faglisl; ^iterate. * 

Early English prose and poetry — Sir John Mandeville — Sir Thomas 
More's Life of Edward the Fifth — Chaucer's Tales— Attempted pa- 
raphrases — Chaucer Modernized — Conflict of Norman and Saxon 
elements — Gower — Reign of Edward the Third — Continental wars 
— Petrarch — Boccacio — Froissart — The church — Wyclif — Arts and 
Architecture — -Statutes in English — Chaucer resumed — His humour 
and pathos — Sense of natural beauty — The Temple of Fame — 
Chaucer and Mr. Babbage — The flower and the leaf — Canterbury 
Tales — Chaucer's high moral tone — Wordsworth's stanza — Poet's 
corner and Chaucer's tamb — The death of a Language — English 
minstrelsy — Percy's Reliques — Sir Walter Scott — Wilson — Chris- 
tian hymns and chaunts — Conversion of King Edwin — Martial bal- 
lads — Lockhart — Spanish ballads — Ticknor's great work — Edom of 
Gordon — Dramatic power of the ballad — The Two Brothers — Con- 
trast of early and late English poetry. 

I proceed now to some general considerations of the 
chief eras into which my subject may be ; without 
difficulty, divided. The whole period of our literature 
may be determined with more precision than might at 
first be expected, considering the gradual development 
of the language out of its Anglo-Saxon original. It is a 
literature covering the last five hundred years ; for, while 



* Thursday, Jan. 24, 1850. Prefixed to this lecture, in manu- 
script, are some desultory hints as to authorities to be consulted by 
students of English literature. As they were but hints, though very 
interesting as illustrative of Mr. Reed's views on this subject, and 
formed no part of the regular course, I may print them in an ap- 
pendix. W. B. K. 

11 ^21 



122 



LECTURE FOURTH. 



Sir John Mandeville, whose book of travels has gained for 
him the reputation of the first English prose-writer, flou- 
rished in the first part of the fourteenth century, the first 
great English poet died in the year 1400. The early 
English prose possesses, however, little, if any, purely 
literary interest; its value is antiquarian, and chiefly as 
showing the formation of the language. It is worthy of 
remark, that the prose powers of a language, and, conse- 
quently, that division of literature, are more slowly and 
laboriously disclosed than the poetic resources. Though 
the history of English prose begins about 1350, with 
what is considered the first English book — Sir John 
Mandeville' s Travels — a century and a half more was 
required to achieve any thing like the excellence of later 
English prose. It is not until about 1509, that Mr. Hal- 
lam finds in Sir Thomas More's Life of Edward V. what 
he pronounces "the first example of good English lan- 
guage ) pure and perspicuous, well chosen, without 
vulgarisms or pedantry/'* There is, therefore, a pe- 
riod, and that of considerable length, during which, for 
all that makes up the essential and high value of lite- 
rature, the prose of the period has very little claim 
upon us. It is not so, however, with the poetry of early 
English literature ; for, as Mr. De Quincy has remarked, 
"At this hour, five hundred years since their creation, 
the tales of Chaucer, never equalled on this earth for 
tenderness and for life of picturesqueness, are read fa- 
miliarly by many in the charming language of their natal 
day."f And Coleridge said : "I take increasing delight in 



* Hallam's Literature of Europe, vol. i. p. 232. 

f Essay on Pope, p. 154. 



EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE. 



123 



Chaucer. His manly cheerfulness is especially delicious 
to me in my old age. How exquisitely tender he is, and 
yet how perfectly free from the least touch of sickly 
melancholy or morbid drooping ! The sympathy of the 
poet with the subjects of his poetry, is particularly re- 
markable in Shakspeare and Chaucer ; but what the first 
effects by a strong act of imagination and mental meta- 
morphosis, the last does without any effort, merely by the 
inborn kindly joyousness of his nature."* 

The present poet-laureate of England has said, " So 
great is my admiration of Chaucer's genius, and so pro- 
found my reverence for him as an instrument in the 
hands of Providence for spreading the light of literature 
through his native land, that I am glad of the effort for 
making many acquainted with his poetry who would 
otherwise be ignorant of every thing about him but his 
name"f Another eminent living man of letters has ex- 
pressed his admiration of the old poet, by saying that he 
rather objected to any attempts to remove the difficulties 
of the antique text, inasmuch as he wished " to keep 
Chaucer for himself and a few friends." 

Unfortunately, the obsolete dialect in which Chaucer 
wrote is such an obstacle, that it is far easier to keep him 
for oneself than to recover for him now the hearing of 
his fellow-men, which he once commanded, and which 
can never cease to be the due of his genius. I know of 
nothing in literary history like the fate of Chaucer in this 

* Table Talk, vol. ii. p. 297. 

f This is an extract from a letter from Wordsworth to Mr. Reed, 
dated January 13, 1841, sending a copy of a little volume published 
in London, called " The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer Modernized-" 
The work is by different hands. W. B. R. 



124 



LECTURE FOURTH, 



respect. His poems are not in a dead language ; they 
cannot be said to be in a living language. They are not 
in a foreign tongue, and yet they are hardly in our own. 
There is much that is the English still in use, and there 
is much that is very different. A reader not accustomed 
to English so antiquated, opens a volume of Chaucer, and 
he meets words that are familiar and words that are un- 
couth to him. In this, there is something repulsive to 
the eye and the ear, especially in finding words strangely 
syllabled and accented. He is not prepared to apply him- 
self to it as he might to a poem in a foreign or dead lan- 
guage, to be toilsomely translated; and yet he cannot ap- 
proach it as the literature of his own living speech. 
The use of glossaries and explanatory vocabularies can- 
not be dispensed with; but, to most readers, this is a 
wearisome process, for there is something thwarting and 
vexatious in finding ourselves at fault in dealing with our 
own mother-tongue. It seems like encountering the curse 
of Babel in our own homes, on our own hearths ; and 
that is a misery. In forming acquaintance with ancient 
or foreign literature, the student knows that a well-de- 
fined exertion is needed, and this he makes in working 
his way through ancient or foreign words and idioms; 
and thus he comes to know the literature of Greece and 
Eome, of France, or Italy, or Germany. But the anti- 
quated dialect of his own language is a mingled mass 
of sunshine and shadow, with sharp and sudden changes 
from one to the other, so that the mind is distracted in 
the uncertainty how long the clearness will last, and how 
soon the obscurity will come again, going along, like 
Christabel, c( now in glimmer and now in gloom. " This 
proves a greater obstacle than the total separation of lan- 



EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE. . 125 

guage which enforces the task of translation, and it has 
been remarked with truth that, "if Chaucer's poems had 
been written in Greek or Hebrew, they would have been 
a thousand times better known. They would have been 
translated."* 

A process akin to translation has been attempted, the 
most noted of the paraphrases of Chaucer's poems being 
those by Dryden and Pope. Those versions are, however, 
of little avail for what should have been their chief pur- 
pose ; for, while they serve to give the reader a notion 
of Dryden and Pope, the genius of Chaucer, with all 
its natural simplicity and power, is lost by being trans- 
muted into the elaborate polish of the verse of the times 
of Charles the Second and of Queen Anne. 

The only successful attempt to make the approach to 
the poetry of Chaucer more easy, by modifying his diction 
and metre, has been made within the last few years, in 
a small work entitled "Chaucer Modernized." It may 
be recommended as a safe introduction to a knowledge of 
Chaucer's poetry, for the versions are from the pens of 
several distinguished living poets, combining in this service 
of filial reverence to the memory of the Father of English 
Poetry; and the versions are composed strictly on this 
principle, that the paraphrase is limited to such changes 
as are absolutely necessary to render the meaning and 
metre of the original intelligible; and thus the reader in 
the nineteenth century is placed in the same relative posi- 
tion as the reader of the fourteenth, communing with the 
imagination of the Poet, through verse which is readily 
and naturally familiar. 



* Introduction to " Chaucer Modernized," p. 5. 
11* 



1-6 



LECTURE FOURTH. 



Now, considering these difficulties of language, it is re- 
markable that the few readers of Chaucer's poetry should 
have had authority, from generation to generation, to sus- 
tain his traditionary fame; for if he is not known and felt 
to be the earliest of the great English poets, he is at least 
always named as such. 

" That noble Chaucer, in those former times, 
Who first enriched our English with his rhymes, 
And was the first of ours that ever broke 
Into the Muse's treasures, and first spoke 
In mighty numbers delving in the mine 
Of perfect knowledge, which he could refine 
And coin for current, and as much as then 
The English language could express for men, 
He made it do."* 

Usually, in the history of a nation's literature, it may be 
observed that the language and the literature move forward 
together — the rude dialect being adequate to express the 
motives of the rude mind; so that what is handed down 
in an unformed language is commonly nothing more than 
the imperfect products of the early intellect or fancy. 
But the peculiarity of Chaucer's position in literary 
history is just this, that in the era of an un shaped lan- 
guage, we have an author of the very highest rank of 
poetic genius. 

That Chaucer took the language of his own time, and 
in its best estate, (for language always makes gift of its 
best wealth to a great poet,) need not be doubted ; but it is 
difficult to conceive the condition of "the language dur- 
ing his time, in the fifty years' reign of Edward the 
Third. For the scholastic uses of the learned, and for 



* Drayton's Elegy, " To my dearly-loved friend, Henry Reynolds, 
Esq., " Of Poets and Poesy." Anderson's Poets, vol. iiL p. 348. 



EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE. 



127 



ecclesiastical purposes, the Latin was still a living lan- 
guage. The French was the speech of the court, and in 
private correspondence had superseded the Latin. But 
with the great body of the people there was the great body 
of Anglo-Saxon words and forms of speech, with a living 
power in them which no foreign or ancient dialects could 
quench; and to that, the English language, imperfect, 
unformed, and changing as it was, this great poet gave his 
heart ; showing, like his most illustrious successors, that 
the great poet is ever a true patriot also. "Let, then," 
said Chaucer, "clerkes enditen in Latin, for they have the 
proper tie of science, and the knowing of that facultie; and 
lette Frenchmen in their French also enditen their queint 
termes, for it is kindly to their mouthes; and let us show 
our fantasies in such wordes as we learnden of our Dame's 
tongue. " And when he wrote for the teaching of his 
little son, he used English, because, said he, " curious 
enditying and harde sentences are full hevy at once for 
such a childe to lerne," and bids the boy think of it as the 
King's English.* 

It needed the large soul of a great poet to make choice 
of the People's speech rather than the dialects of the 
learned or the nobles. Chaucer's contemporary and 
senior brother-poet, honoured by him as the "moral 
Grower," ventured upon no such confidence in the language 
of the land. The legacy of his song was committed to 
Latin and to French words ; and yet what might he not 
have achieved, had he oftener trusted the rude mother- 
tongue, as in that passage in which he pictures Medea 



* Prologue to Testament of Love. Ed. 1542, cited in Pickering's 
Edition of Chaucer, vol. i. p. 202. 



J28 



LECTURE FOURTH. 



going forth at midnight to gather herbs for the incantations 
of her witchcraft ? I give you without a change, the words 
and the metre, five hundred years old, of the poet Grower : 

" Thus it befell upon a night, 
"Whann there was naught but sterre light, 
She was vanished right as hir list, 
That no wight but hirselfe wist : 
And that was at midnight-tide ; 
The world was still on every side. 
With open head, and foote all bare 
His heare to spread ; she gan to fare : 
Upon the clothes gyrte she was, 
And speecheles, upon the gras 
She glode forth, as an adder doth." 

If Chaucer was unfortunate in the period of his country's 
language, he was happy in the era of his country's history. 
The Saxon and the Norman, the conqueror and con- 
quered, had grown together into one people. It was Chau- 
cer's fortune to be an eye-witness of that vast ambition 
which fired his sovereign in grasping at the diadem of 
France, to make the two great monarchies of Europe one ; 
and how could the fire in a great poet's heart sleep, when 
he beheld his king and his prince, those proud Plantaga- 
nets, the third Edward and his heroic son, going forth 
like royal knights-errant in quest of majestic adventures. 
The reign was one of high monarchal pride, displayed, 
however, so as to animate a high national pride by lifting 
up the sense of the nation's dignity, and power, and mag- 
nificence. Kings were suppliant to England's princes for 
help — kings were captive in England's capital; and that 
ambitious noble, " old John of Gaunt," Chaucer's patron 
and Kinsman, not content with his English dukedom, was 
proclaimed King of Castile. It was a period of high- 
wrougru martial enthusiasm, and the early modes of war- 



EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE. 



129 



fare passed not away without fierce employment, as if the 
arrow could not cease to be a weapon of death without 
drinking its last deep draught of blood, when the air was 
darkened over the plains of Crecy and Poictiers, by the 
shafts from the hosts of English archers. With all the 
animating movements of the reign, Chaucer was in close 
and active sympathy; he was a courtier and a soldier, as 
well as a student. No poet has ever held such large and 
free communion with the world and his fellow-men. He 
stood in the presence of kings and nobles ; and became 
versed in the lore of chivalry, its principles and its 
fashions : he went forth from the pomp of the court to do 
a soldier's service, and in the season of peace to muse in 
the fields, to look with loving eyes upon the flowers, to 
sympathize with the simple hearts of children and of pea- 
sants, to honour Womanhood alike in humble or in high 
estate, and to commune with the faithful and the zealous 
of the priesthood. He travelled into foreign lands, an 
envoy or an exile, (so varied was his career,) happy, if 
the conjecture be not unfounded, in listening to words 
falling from the living lips of Italy's great poet, then the 
aged Petrarch, possibly meeting Boccacio and Froissart. 
When, near three hundred years later, the youthful Milton 
visited the shores of Italy, amid all the classical associa- 
tions that were thronging into his heart, he found room 
for the proud memory that the father of English poetry 
had stood on the same soil.* 



* In the Epistle to Manso, the friend of Tasso, a production which 
Mr. Hillard, in his charming book on Italy, calls " the most Virgilian 
of all compositions not written by Virgil," Milton says : 
Ergo ego te, Clius et magni nomine Phoebi, 
Manse pater, jubeo longum salvere per aevum, 



130 



LECTURE FOURTH. 



The times in which Chaucer lived were momentous 
also as a period in which were first seen the forecast 
shadows of mighty changes in the Christian church; and 
we can well believe that his heart must have leaped up 
when he beheld the bold British hand of John Wyclif, 
a hundred years and more before the days of Luther, 
strike the first blow at ecclesiastical tyranny — the same 
hand which was an instrument of Providence in taking the 
seal from off the Bible, and spreading it in living English 
words throughout the land. 

The last half of the fourteenth century, which was the pe- 
riod of Chaucer's manhood, (for he died, let it be remem- 
bered, an aged man, in the year 1400,) was an era in which 
the English mind was touched by many of its finest and 
most quickening influences. The impulse it received was 
manifest in various departments of human thought. The 
arts were cultivated, civic architecture especially, and chiefly 
that sacred form of it which has been the wonder of after 
ages. Painting was cultivated, and the more glorious 
sister art of poetry was taught by two poets more eminent 
than England had yet produced, John Gower and Geoffry 
Chaucer. It was fitting that in such an age the Parlia 
ment of England should decree that the statutes of the 

Missus Hyperboreo juvenis peregrinus ab axe. 
Nec tu longinquam bonus aspernabere musam, 
Quae nuper gelida vix enutrita sub Arcto, 
Iinprudens Italas ausa est volitare per urbes. 
Nos etiam in nostro modulantes flumine cygnos 
Credimus obscuras noctis sensisse per umbras, 
Qua Thamesis late puris argenteus urnis 
Oceani glaucos perfundit gurgite crines 
Qain et in bas quondam pervenit Tityrus oras." 
Mitford's Milton, vol. 3, p. 317. W. B. R. 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



131 



realm were no longer to be enrolled in a foreign dialect, 
but that the voice of British legislation should speak in 
the nation's own language. 

The student of literature, who will take the pains to 
master the difficulties of Chaucer's antiquated poems — 
and they will quickly diminish before him — will find an 
abundant reward. His poems are as varied as they are 
voluminous, rich in original materials and in that which, 
drawn from foreign sources — the Latin, French, and 
Italian literature — bears in the transmutation the glory 
of a great poet's invention. What most distinguishes 
the genius of Chaucer is the comprehensiveness and 
variety of his powers. You look at him in his gay mood, 
and it is so genial that that seems to be his very nature, 
an overflowing comic power, or, rather, that power touched 
with thoughtfulness and tenderness — " humour" in its 
finest estate. And then you turn to another phase of 
his genius, and with something of wonder, and more of 
delight, you find it shining with a light as true and natu- 
ral and beautiful into the deeper places of the human 
soul — its woes, its anguish, and its strength of suffering 
and of heroism. In this, the harmonious union of true 
tragic and comic powers, Chaucer and Shakspeare stand 
alone in our literature : it places these two above all the 
other great poets of our language, for such combination 
is the highest endowment of poetic genius. 

The genius of Chaucer is manifest also in that other 
characteristic of the poetic spirit, wise and genial com- 
munion with the spiritual influences of the material world, 
" Earth, air, ocean, and the starry sky." All nature is 
with him alive with a fresh and active life-blood. His 
green leaves, it has been well said, are the greenest that 



132 



LECTURE FOURTH. 



were ever seen. His grass is the gladdest green; the 
cool and fragrant breezes he sings of seem to fan the 
reader's cheek ; his birds pour forth notes the most thrill- 
ing, the most soothing, that ever touched mortal ear— 

" There was many and many a lovely note, 
Some singing loud, as if they had complained ; 
Some with their notes another manner feigned; 
And some did sing all out with the full throat." 

The earth and sky — -his earth and sky — are steeped in 
brightest sunshine, and " all things else about him drawn 
from May-time and the cheerful dawn."* 

* Introduction to Chaucer Modernized, p. xcvi., and Words- 
worth's Version of the Cuckoo and the Nightingale, p. 41. I am 
tempted in this connection to make an extract from a most grace- 
ful tribute to my brother's memory in a private letter from Lady 
Richardson, the wife of Sir John Richardson of Arctic celebrity, 
and a lady of high intelligence and accomplishments. It is descrip- 
tive of the first impression of a bright May morning, with its gentle 
companionship of singing birds and flowers, among the English lakes 
and amid Wordsworth's haunts : " It must have been," writes Lady 
Richardson, u about the middle of May that we heard of Mr. Reed's 
arrival at Rydal Mount; on the next day he called. The day was 
so beautiful, that, fearing he might not see the valley of the Easedale 
again on so fine a day, I took him to Wordsworth's Wall and round 
the Terrace Walk for a first view. We had little time for more than 
to walk quickly round, I pointing out where " the Prelude" was com- 
posed, and where so many summer hours were passed. He did not 
say much ; but the expression of his face showed me the deep delight 
he felt, both in the present beauty and in the associations the place 
recalled. As we returned, the " Wandering Voice" was peculiarly 
blythe and near to us on that May morning, and I remember he told 
me he had heard the cuckoo for the first time at Rydal Mount. He 
remarked on the beauty of the holly, which he did not seem to know 
before. He spoke of Southey's lines on the holly-tree, the loss of its 
thorns, and its smooth leaves as it grows high, compared to what old 
age should be. We paused to talk and sit and quote some of our favourite 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



133 



A favourite form of imaginative composition of those 
times was the romantic allegory, and Chaucer, taking up 
the fashion, has perpetuated it, especially in two poems, 
which the life-giving power of genius yet preserves. One 
of these, the " House of Fame," is known to modern readers 
chiefly through Pope's paraphrase, bearing the statelier 
title — a characteristic alteration — of the " Temple of Fame." 
This poem is not one on which I need stop for criticism, 
and I am about to mention it for quite a different purpose. 
It contains a passage which has struck me as in curious 
anticipation of a scientific hypothesis suggested in our 
own days; poetic imagination foreshadowing the results 
of scientific reasoning. In the ninth Bridgewater Treatise, 
from the pen of Mr. Babbage, he propounded a theory 
respecting the permanent impressions of our words — spoken 
words — a theory startling enough almost to close a man's 
lips in perpetual silence : " That the pulsations of the 
air, once set in motion by the human voice, cease not to 
exist with the sounds to which they give rise ; that the 
waves of the air thus raised perambulate the earth and 

lines; and all that he said impressed me with the feeling of his being 
of that genial, elevated, and kindly stamp which Wordsworth most de- 
lighted in. On coming to a walk at the foot of some rocks which my 
husband had engineered during his last visit, Mr. Reed said, 'How 
pleasant it is, that one whose heroic character and sufferings interested 
me so much, as a boy, in America, can now be associated with this 
lovely scene V We parted with a promise that they would come and 
see me in the South. This they were unfortunately prevented doing, 
and we never met again/' — 3IS. Letter. I hope I violate no pro- 
priety in using a letter which never was intended for the public eye; 
but the temptation to give this glimpse of the last bright hours, the 
simple, natural tastes and pure imaginings, associated, like his great 
poetic models, with all that was beautiful in nature, of one whom it 
la now no flattery to praise, has been irresistible. W. B. R. 
I 12 



134 



LECTURE FOURTH. 



ocean's surface; and soon every atom of its atmosphere 
takes up the altered movement, due to the infinitesimal 
portion of the primitive motion which has been conveyed 
to it through countless channels, and which must continue 
to influence its paths throughout its future existence. 
Every atom/' adds the philosopher, " impressed with good 
and with ill, retains at once the motions which philoso- 
phers and sages have imparted to it, mixed and combined, 
in ten thousand ways, with all that is worthless and base. 

. . . The atmosphere we breathe is the ever-living wit- 
ness of the sentiments we have uttered, .... and (in 
another state of being) the offender may hear still vibrat- 
ing in his ear the very words, uttered perhaps thousands 
of centuries before, which at once caused and registered 
his own condemnation." 

Now I have no thought of intimating, in the most 
remote degree, that in this remarkable train of thought 
Mr. Babbage was under obligations to Chaucer. The 
passage has an air of absolute originality; and, besides, the 
writer of it is too strong-minded and manly to allow such 
obligations, if they existed, to pass unacknowledged. 1 
have no sympathy with the spirit which delights in detect- 
ing plagiarisms in the casual and innocent coincidences 
which every student knows are frequently occurring. That 
there is such a coincidence worthy of notice, will be seen 
in these lines in The House of Fame : 

" Sound is nought but air that's broken, 
And every speeche that is spoken, 
Whe'er loud or low, foul or fair, 
In his substance is but air : 
For as flame is but lighted smoke, 
Right so is sound but air that's broke, 
Eke where that men harpstrings smite 



THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



135 



Whether that be much or lite, 

Lo ! with the stroke, the air it breaketh ; 

Thus wot'st thou well what thing is speecW i 

Now, henceforth, I will thee teach 

How ever each speeche, voice or sown, 

Through his multiplicion, 

Though it were piped of a mouse, 

Must needs come to Fame's House. 

I prove it thus ; taketh heed now 

By experience, for if that thou 

Throw in a water now a stone, 

Well wot'st thou it will make anon 

A little roundel as a circle, 

Par venture as broad as a covercle, 

And right anon thou shalt see well 

That circle cause another wheel, 

And that the third, and so forth, brother, 

Every circle causing other, 

Much broader than himselfen was : 

Right so of air, my leve brother, 

Ever each air another stirreth, 

More and more and speech up beareth, 

Till it be at the ' House of Fame/ "* 



* That this was mere coincidence, Mr. Reed ascertained, in con- 
versation with Mr. Babbage, on his visit to England, in 1854. "I 
mentioned to him/' Mr. Reed writes to a friend in America, "that I 
had once in a public lecture quoted from his Bridgewater Treatise the 
startling passage about the perpetuity of sound, and that some of my 
audience used to say that it almost made them afraid for some days 
to speak, from the dread that the sounds were to last, and mayhap 
come back to them in the hereafter : on telling him I had cited the pas- 
sage in a literary connection, as a curious parallelism with Chaucer, he 
expressed much surprise, and begged me to refer to the passage. It 
was all new to hini." — MS. Letter. 

A curious chapter on these perfectly innocent coincidences might 
be written — for literary history is full of them. In Lockhart's Scott, 
(vol. x. p. 208,) it is said, " Dr. Watson, having consulted on all things 
with Mr. Clarkson and his father, resigned the patient to them, and 



136 



LECTURE FOURTH. 



One of the brightest dreams that poet ever fashioned 
out of shadowy imaginings, is the allegory, " The Flower 
and the Leaf" with its beautiful moral, and an exuberance 
of fancy seldom met with out of the region of early 
poetry. A gentlewoman, seated in an arbour, beholds a 
great company of ladies and knights in a dance on the 
grass, which being ended, they all kneel down and do 
honour to the daisy — some to the flower, and some to the 
leaf ; and the meaning thereof is this : " They which 
honour the flower, a thing fading with every blast, are 
such as look after beauty and worldly pleasure ; but they 
that honour the leaf, which abideth with the root, not- 
withstanding the frosts and winter storms, are they which 
follow virtue and during qualities, without regard of 
worldly respects." 

The fame of Chaucer rests, however, chiefly on the 



returned to London. None of them could have any hope but that of 
soothing irritation. Recovery was no longer to be thought of, but 
there might be Euthanasia." A hundred years before Arbuthnot wrote 
to Pope, "a recovery in my case and at my age is impossible: the 
kindest wish of my friends is Euthanasia." Haydon, in his strange 
journal, writing in 1826, says, "There is hardly any thing new. I 
never literally stole but one figure in my life (Aaron) from Raphael. 
Yet to-day I found my Olympias, which I had dashed in in a heat, 
exactly a repetition of an Antigone, and the first thing I saw in the 
Louvre was Poussin's Judgment of Solomon, with Solomon in nearly 
the same position as in my picture. Yet I solemnly declare I never 
saw even the print when I conceived my Solomon, which was done 
one night, before I began to paint, at nineteen, when I lodged in 
Carey Street, and was ill in my eyes. I lay back in my chair, and 
indulged myself in composing my Solomon. I will venture to say, no 
painter but Wilkie will believe this, though it is as true as that two 
and two make four." Haydon's Memoirs, vol. i. p. 488 ; see also WiU 
mott's Pleasures of Literature, p. 259. W. B. R. 



EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE. 



great work of his matured powers, showing how genius 
carries forward the freshness of feeling for three-scoie 
years. I refer, of course, to the "Canterbury Tales" an 
unfinished poem, like the Faery Queen, and, like it, won- 
derful as a fragment, for the vast extent of what is 
achieved, as well as of what was planned. The design 
of this poem is one of the happiest thoughts that ever 
housed itself in a poet's heart. A chance-gathered com- 
pany of pilgrims on their way to the shrine of St. Thomas 
a Becket at Canterbury, meet in a London inn, and the 
host proposes that they beguile the ride by each telling 
a tale to his fellow-pilgrims. Thus comes, with its large 
variety, the collection of the Canterbury Tales. The 
prologue, containing the description of the pilgrims, is 
better known, perhaps, than the rest of the work, partly, 
perhaps, from Stothard's well-known picture of the pil- 
grimage. From this prefatory poem of a few hundred 
lines, a truer and livelier conception of the state of so- 
ciety in England, five hundred years ago, can be got than 
from all other sources of information. It makes us more 
at home there in the distant years \ carries us more into 
the spirit of the age ; lets us see the men and the women 
of those times, be among them and know their ways 
of life, manners, and dress, far better than any unima- 
ginative record can do. There are a hundred things — 
prime elements, too, in a nation's heart — that history 
never troubles itself with. The torch of a poet's ima- 
gination is held on high, and forthwith a light is thrown 
on the whole region $ound, and we see a multitude of 
objects which else would be lost in the distance or the 
darkness. 

Among other matters, -the poems of Chaucer are full 

12* 



138 



LECTURE FOURTH. 



of testimony, unstudied testimony, on a momentous sub- 
ject — tke condition of the Church in those ages, when its 
abuses, looseness, and luxury roused the indignation of the 
first of the great Reformers. What an image of monastic 
voluptuousness is there in one of Chaucer's pictures, a full- 
length portrait in one line, when he describes the monk, 

" Fat as a whale, and walked like a swan V 

Nor was the poet's bold satire of the corruptions which 
had crept into the Church the sarcasm of a licentious, 
irreverent temper, for he has bequeathed to all after- 
times a portrait of the pure clerical character, which, as 
an imaginative picture of holy life, of Christian piety, 
zeal, meekness, and self-sacrifice, still stands unequalled 
in English literature : 

"A poor parson of a town : 
% * #- % 

Wide was his parish — houses far asunder- — 
But he neglected nought for rain or thunder, 
In sickness and in grief to visit all, 
The farthest in his parish, great and small, 
Always on foot, and in his hand a stave. 
This noble example to his flock he gave : 
That first he wrought, and afterward he taught ; 
Out of the gospel he that lesson caught, 
And this new figure added he thereto, 
That if gold rust, then what should iron do ? w * 

The prologue is curious, too, as representing the free 
dom and ease of intercourse between the characters, drawn, 
as they are, from different ranks of society — an absence of 
reserve and restraint remarkable in an age with which we 
are apt, falsely perhaps, to associate much of stateliness 



* Prologue to Canterbury Tales, v. 479. 



EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE. 



139 



and ceremonial. We find here a little social drama, as 
it were, bearing strongly the stamp of nature and reality, 
and the parties are unreservedly communing with each 
other — riding, talking, laughing, eating together. Here 
is the knight, "a very perfect, gentle knight," newly 
returned from his adventures, and modest with the memo- 
ries of many a battle on sea and land, fought with the 
Moors and the foes of the faithful far away. With him 
comes his son, full of gayety and gallantry, "wakeful as 
a nightingale with his amorous ditties;" and the rest of 
the company is made up of a demure prioress, a monk, a 
friar and other ecclesiastical functionaries ; a merchant, a 
franklin, a sea-captain, the doctor of physic, " whose 
study was but little on the Bible the lawyer, " a very 
busy man, yet seeming busier than he really was;" the 
parson, drawing mankind to heaven by gentleness ; the 
miller, crafty in cheating his customers ; the ploughman, 
a good, constant, labouring man, living in peace and 
charity, working hard, and cheerfully paying his dues to 
the church, along with other hearty commoners, spruced 
up for the pilgrimage in holiday-dress. There is the fro- 
licsome wife of Bath ; and a very different character, not 
to be forgotten, the Oxford student, silent or sententious, 
thoughtful and thin by dint of hard study, riding on a 
lean horse : 

" He had rather have at his bed's head 
Some twenty volumes, clothed in black or red, 
Of Aristotle and his philosophy, 
Than richest robes, fiddle or psaltery. 
But tho' a true philosopher was he, 
Yet had he little gold beneath his key; 
But every farthing that his friends e'er lent, 
In books and learning was it always spent/' 



140 



LECTURE FOURTH. 



These various characters are brought into happy com- 
panionship ) and indeed the spirit of all Chaucer's poetry 
shows that if his own lot was cast in the company of kings 
and nobles, his human heart had large spaces to hold his 
fellow-beings in. His sympathies were with freedom in 
all created things, as in a passage, which is enough, I 
think, of itself, to open the prison-door and give to liberty 
and life again any caged bird in the world. 

"Where birds are fed in cages, 
Though you should day and night tend them like pages, 
And strew the bird's room fair and soft as silk, 
And give him sugar, honey, bread, and milk : 
Yet had the bird, by twenty thousand fold, 
Rather be in a forest wild and cold : 
And right anon, let but his door be up, 
And with his feet he spurneth down his cup, 
And to the wood will hie, and feed on worms. 
In that new college keepeth he his terms, 
And learneth love of his own proper kind: 
No gentleness of home his heart may bind/' 

The poetry of Chaucer is distinguished also for what is 
an inseparable quality of all high poetry, its genuine and 
healthy morality, for true imagination is ever one of 
virtue's ministers. The indelicacy and grossness which 
stain some of his pages seem to belong rather to the col- 
loquial coarseness of his times, than to fasten on the 
purity of his feelings. He pleads forgiveness for these 
blemishes, as not of evil intent, and it is easy to follow 
his advice when he bids his reader, 

" Turn over the leaf, and choose another tale ; 
For he shall find enough, both great and smale, 
Of storial thing that toucheth gentilesse, 
And eke morality and holiness." 

One of the purest and wisest of the great English poets 



EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE. 



141 



who have succeeded Chaucer, has said of him, "If Chaucer 
is sometimes a coarse moralist, he is still a great one."* 
The plain-spoken coarseness is a spot here and there, but 
the great body of his poetry is a poet's pure and lofty 
discipline, thoughtful and affectionate reverence of womanly 
worth, teaching of Christian well-doing, of heroic morality, 
and of the morality of every-day life. He moralizes in 
the poet's happiest mood, imaginatively, feelingly, humor- 
ously, as when he teaches us that much-neglected art, the 
art of living with one another, the social duty of mutual 
forbearance. 

" One thing, sirs, full safely dare I say, 
That loving friends each other must obey, 
If they would long remain in company : 
Love will not be constraint by mastery. 
When mastery cometh, the God of Love, anon 
Beateth his wings, and, farewell ! he is gone. 
Love is a thing as any spirit free : 
Women, by nature, wish for liberty, 
And not to be constraint as in a thrall ; 
And so do men — to speak truth — one and all. 
Note well the wight most patient in his love : 
He standeth, in advantage, all above. 
That patience is a virtue high, is plain, 
Because it conquers, as the clerk es explain, 
Things that rude vigour never could attain. 
Chide not for every trifle, nor complain; 
Learn to endure, or, so betide my lot, 
Learn it ye shall, whether ye will or not. 
For in this world is no one, certain 'tis, 
But that he sometimes doth or saith amiss. 
Anger, ill health, or influence malign 
Of planets, changes in the blood, woe, wine, 



* Wordsworth, as quoted in the Introduction to Chaucer Modern- 
ized, p. xcviii. 



142 



LECTURE FOURTH. 



Oft :ause in word or deed that we transgress ; 
For, for every wrong we should not seek redress. 
After a time there must be temperance 
In every man that knows self-governance." 

There is a deeper strain of poetic wisdom on a kindred 
subject, showing that indeed " we live by admiration, hope, 
and love/' in that fine exposition of the moral influences 
of well-directed affection, when, speaking of dutiful love, 
he says : 

" In this world no service is so good 
For every wight that gentle is of kind, 
For thereof comes all goodness and all worth ; 
All gentleness and honour thence come forth; 
Thence worship comes, content, and true heart's pleasure, 
And full-assured trust, joy without measure, 
And jollity, fresh cheerfulness, and mirth : 
And bounty, lowliness, and courtesy, 
And seemliness and faithful company, 
And dread of shame that will not do amiss." 

The same spirit, connecting all true passion with 
its deeper moral associations, is to be traced in that 
stanza of Wordsworth's, conveying in a few lines at once 
the simplest and sublimest conception of the passion of 
Love : 

" Learn by a mortal yearning, to ascend 
Towards a higher object. Love was given, 
Encouraged, sanctioned chiefly for that end ; 
For this the passion to excess was driven, 
That self might be annulled : her bondage prove 
The fetters of a dream, opposed to love."* 

Such is the affinity between the souls of great poets, 
though centuries are between them. 

It is now well-nigh four hundred and fifty years since 



* Laodamia, Works, p. 142. Am. Edition. 



4 

EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE. 143 

th^ body of Chaucer was entombed in that corner of 
Westminster Abbey where, in after generations, the pe- 
rishable remains of other of England's great poets were 
to be gathered round his. Four centuries pass not over 
the writings of any mortal without defacing and oblite- 
rating. Language is liable to undergo perpetual changes; 
any person may observe, in even a short space of years, 
new forms of expression coming into use, old ones 
growing obsolete. Time brings along with it new modes 
of life, of thought, and action. Opinions and feel- 
ings often grow old-fashioned — fall behind the times, as 
the phrase is ; and, as these are things that enter so 
largely into the composition of books, it needs must be 
that they, too, grow old-fashioned, obsolete, obscure. 
Chiefly will this happen when it has fallen to an author's 
lot to write in an unformed language, when the speech of 
men is made up of various and unsettled dialects, and, 
therefore, most quickly perishes for want of that consist- 
ency which alone perpetuates it. Time is busy in the 
work of change with all that is upon the earth : the 
brow is furrowed, the voice is broken, and the sight fails; 
temple and tower moulder with its touch ; empires and 
dynasties are varying and wasting; but the strangest work 
of mutability is that which is at work with language. The 
most wondrous mortality the world witnesses is the dying 
of language. It almost baffles human conception to 
speculate either upon the birth or the death of the mul- 
titude, or rather the family of words that make up a 
nation's speech ; to think how thousands of mankind 
come to utter their thoughts and feelings in the same 
words and the same combinations of words; and then, 
that, in the course of time, as if the earth and all earthly 



144 



LECTURE FOURTH. 



things should be as changeful as the moon which lights 
it, such utterance is changed, and at length wholly lost 
from the living tongue. Its sound becomes an uncertain 
and disputed thing, for it is only seen on the pages of 
books, or it may be only in dim and dubious inscriptions 
on the broken column, the ruined arch, or the empty 
monument. I know of nothing which so teaches the 
transitoriness of things as that phrase of mournful sig- 
nificance, u a dead language." How does it startle us 
in our pride, the bare apprehension of our English 
speech changing into a lifeless and mouldy record — some- 
thing dark for scholars and antiquaries vainly to attempt 
to enlighten — something of a degenerate dialect, in which 
might be faintly traced the shadows of a mighty lan- 
guage. The curse of the confusion of tongues is an 
unending curse, like the sentence of labour, on rebel- 
lious man. From the time when the ambition of men 
brought down this penalty, and the whole earth ceased to 
be "of one language and one speech," nations have been 
scattered abroad upon the face of all the earth, no longer 
understanding one another's speech — one generation, too, 
becoming unintelligible to another. So must it ever be 
as long as a cloud of divine displeasure travels onward 
with the earth, casting down upon it a dark shadow ; and 
hence no language, no matter how lofty its literature may 
be, can boast a privilege from decay : 

" Babylon, 
Learned and wise, hath perished utterly, 
Nor leaves her speech one word to aid the sigh 
That would lament her." 

The Pyramids, mysterious in their unnumbered centu- 
ries, are standing almost as imperishable as the Nile, and 



EARLY 



ENGLISH 



LITERATURE, 



145 



yet not one word survives that was spoken by the tens of 
thousands who toiled in building them : 

" Egyptian Thebes, 
Tyre by the margin of the sounding waves, 
Palmyra, central in the desert, fell f 

and all their dialects are silent as the desert sands. That 
noble language, too, of antiquity, with which Athens 
sent forth her philosophy and poetry to the islands of 
the iEgean and the shores of Asia, and " fulmined over 
Greece with her resistless eloquence" — the language 
that Corinth, from her famous isthmus, spake over the 
eastern and western waves, has, for many ages, known no 
other existence than that which it holds on the pages of 
books. The speech of the Roman — the language of em- 
pire and of law, spread by consul and emperor till it was 
stayed by the ocean and the barbarian — how has it ceased 
to hold companionship with the voice, and learned men of 
modern times can only conjecture respecting its accent ! 

If I have been thus led into a digression on the 
changes which are the destiny of all languages, let me 
say, in excuse, that I could scarce check the train of 
thought, being forced to feel most painfully the perish- 
able nature of speech by the reflection that it is that 
cause which has dimmed the glory of the earliest and one 
of the greatest of England's poets. 

The student of early English literature must not omit that 
miscellaneous poetry, obscure in its origin, and indefinite 
in its period — the ancient Minstrelsy. It is poetry of 
native growth, and having the savour of the soil. Exist- 
ing for a long time in a traditional state, it has suffered 
the waste which mere oral tradition is never safe from ; 
and it is only within the last fifty years that pains have 

13 



146 



LECTURE FOURTH. 



been taken to gather the rude strains of those half-civilized 
ages, and to place them on record at this long distance 
of time after they existed as a living poetry. This has 
been done chiefly in Percy's Keliques of Ancient English 
Poetry, and in Sir Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scot- 
tish Border. It was a fine trait in Scott's literary career, 
the affectionate earnestness with which he laboured for the 
recovery of the ancient lays of his native land, and the pre- 
servation of them in some safer form than what they had 
in the memory of aged persons, in times when every year, 
perhaps, was casting them more and more into neglect. 
When Scotu travelled over the country, highland and low- 
land, seeking in its secluded glens for such remains of 
the poetry of the olden times as might not yet be lost out 
of the recollections of an illiterate peasantry — -snatches of 
song remembered by the aged, as having been chaunted 
by the old folks of an earlier generation — he was not only 
gathering materials to illustrate the literature of his 
country, but he was storing his own mind with those large 
resources which his genius afterward poured forth with a 
copiousness which was the world's wonder. When the 
authorship of Waverley was a secret vexing public curi- 
osity, Professor Wilson exclaimed, "I wonder what all 
these people are perplexing themselves with : have they 
forgotten the prose of the Minstrelsy?"* 

Of the minstrel poetry now extant, much belongs to a 
period later than the age of Chaucer ; but there is also 
reason to believe that it had a traditional connection with 
a still earlier and ruder minstrelsy that has perished. A 
more distant influence is to be traced back to the hymns 



* Lockhart's Scott, vol. ii. p. 132. 



EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE. 



147 



and spiritual songs of the Church which accompanied 
Christianity, as it made its spiritual inroads on the fierce 
idolatries of the races of the North. For, although the 
sacred services chaunted by the early Christians and those 
grand hymns of the Middle Ages were in the Latin lan- 
guage, still they accustomed the popular ear to metrical 
sounds, and opened the hearts of the people to the uses of 
poetry. While the ancient classical poetry was sleeping 
its long sleep, to waken in later ages, the sacred songs of 
the early Christians were never silenced, even in years of 
persecution; and it is to them, that the poetry of Christen- 
dom owes its first impulse. 

At a remote age of Britain's history, religious houses 
were built there, and as the holy men who dwelt in them, 
amid aboriginal ferocities and the turmoil of successive 
invasions — the Saxon and the Dane — uttered their songs of 
adoration, those harmonies went forth over river and plain, 
soothing the fierce elements they touched, and charming 
the evil spirit of war which vexed the hearts of barbaric 
kings. The music of a good man's chaunted devotions 
could not float on the air, turbid and tumultuous though, 
it be with wicked passions, without awakening some pure 
and gentle emotions. A single stanza of ancient Saxon 
song survives as a memorial of such influence. When that 
remarkable personage, the Danish King Canute, had over- 
thrown the Saxon dynasty in England, and was making a 
progress through his newly-conquered realm, as with his 
queen and knights he approached by water the Abbey of 
Ely, there arose upon the air the voices of the monks, 
chaunting their stated services ; and when the music fell 
upon the conqueror's ear with such a sweet solemnity, 
chiming both with the river's flow and his own placid 



148 



LECTURE FOURTH. 



emotions, the sword of his bloody conquest sheathed, the 
active sympathy of his imagination found utterance in a 
simple strain of Saxon song, of which but one stanza has 
been spared by time : 

" Sweetly sang the monks in Ely 
As Canute the king was rowing by : 
' Knights, to the land draw near, 
That the monks' song we may hear/ "* 

u This accordant rhyme" was the response of one of the 
mightiest of those Scandinavian monarchs, the " Sea-kings/' 
who struck terror into central Europe ; he, before whom 
the ancient Saxon dynasty quailed, and whose barbarian 
flatterers told him that his word had power to stay the 
surges of the Atlantic ; but, in a happy moment of tran- 
quillity, the saintly music passed through the turbulent 
passions of pride and power into the depths of his human 
heart. 

The same influences doubtless touched the nation's 
heart, and like that rude royal strain, the popular song 
echoed the music of hallowed verse. 

An earlier instance of the power of the imagination to 
impart truth, may be remembered in that beautiful image 
of the mystery of human life which led to the conver- 
sion of King Edwin. A Christian entered the hall of 
the unconverted Saxon, but the tidings he brought were 
strange to the pagan heart, and the king summons his 
chiefs and priests ; at that moment a bird flitted through 
the council-hall, to call from the wise imagination of one 



* Lectures on the History of England : by a Lady p. 439. Words- 
worth's Sonnet. Works, p. 295. 



EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE. 



149 



of the heathen councillors a lesson, recorded by an old 
historian, and preserved in modern verse : 

"Man's life is like a sparrow, mighty king, 
That while at banquet with your chiefs you sit, 
Housed near a blazing fire, is seen to flit, 
Safe from the wintry tempest. Fluttering, 
Here did it enter ; there, on hasty wing, 
Flies out, and passes on from cold to cold ; 
But whence it came we know not, nor behold 
Whither it goes. Even such, that transient thing, 
The human soul, not utterly unknown, 
While in the body lodged, the warm abode; 
But from what world she came, what woe or weal 
On her departure waits, no tongue hath shown. 
This mystery, if the stranger can reveal, 
His be a welcome cordially bestowed."*" 

Important as must have been the influence of the 
metrical services of the church, considered simply as a 
means of civilization, the rude ages needed poetry for 
other uses than devotion. They craved the minstrel's 
power to touch the stories of daring adventure, of wild 
justice and revenge, and the tragic incidents of the field 
and fireside. The earliest of the martial ballads comme- 
morate the exploits of a body of bold outlaws, in whose 
lives there was the last struggle against Norman tyranny. 
The strong hand of the conqueror had seized large tracts 
of land for royal hunting-grounds, the ancient owners 
outcast; and well may the oppressed people have applauded 
the exploits of the hardy archers who claimed their own 
again within the forbidden limits, and thus Robin Hood 
became indeed " the English ballad-singers' joy," asserting, 



* Wordsworth's Works, p. 290. The legend is in Fuller's Church 
History of Britain, vol. i. p. 109. 



150 



LECTURE FOURTH. 



as he did., what, under a complicated tyranny of authority, 

seemed 

" The good old rule, the simple plan, 
That they should take who have the power, 
And they should keep who can." 

The old songs have kept his name, but no historian, 
like Niebuhr with the Roman legends, has unwoven the 
tangled threads of fact and fiction. 

It would be a study of much interest to compare the 
early British ballad poetry with the other ballad poetry 
most famous in European literature. I mean that of 
Spain. Mr. Lockhart's fine version of the Spanish ballads, 
and our countryman Mr. Ticknor's recent classic work 
on Spanish Literature would give facilities for the com- 
parison.* The higher civilization in Spain, both Moorish 
and Christian, and the struggle for centuries between the 
two races, as the Saracen was driven slowly from his last 
foothold in the West of Europe, wars which had the 
dignity of the highest sentiments of religion and loyalty, 
the greater refinement of society — all these things would 
be found in strong contrast with the rudeness of a poetry, 
picturing the feuds of petty chieftains, and the mingled 
ferocity and frolic of the border warfare. 

* To my friend, (for such he has been for many years,) Mr. Tick- 
nor, is in some measure due the publication of these Lectures, for on 
his saying to me, in accidental conversation since my brother's death 
that his literary, and especially his poetical, judgments, were concur- 
rent with his own, I felt the assurance that I might, with no furtbei 
authority, give them to the reading world. I felt, too, that in pub- 
lishing these lectures, I might do something to raise Philadelphia let- 
ters a little nearer to the high level to which such men as Prescott, 
and Ticknor, and Longfellow, and Hillard, have elevated the litera- 
ture of a sister city. W. B. R. 



EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE. 



m 



Our early minstrelsy, with all its comparative rudeness, 
was not without its gentle elements; and we can conceive 
how it helped to civilize the people, when we observe how 
much of pathos is woven into it, how it tells of the ten- 
derness and pity that are congenial with courage and with the 
love of fierce adventure, springing often out of the sternest 
heart : the pathos is social, too, so free from sentimentalism, 
and told so simply. When Edom of Gordon, in his fierce 
assault on the castle, adding the terrors of fire to those of 
the sword, not staying his spear's point from the little 
girl who is lowered over the wall : as his victim lies before 
him, the blood dripping over her yellow hair, remorse ia 
in the words he said : 

"You are the first that ere 
I wish't alive again. 
* * * * 

I might have spared that bonny face, 
To have been some man's delight." 

He calls his men away from his fierce victory 

" 111 dooms I do guess ; 
I cannot look on that bonny face, 
As it lies on the grass." 

This transition of feeling is sometimes given in these 

rude strains with deep effect : observe it, for instance, in 

the contrast between the opening and the close, in these 

few detached stanzas : 

"Beardslee rose up on a May morning, 
Called for water to wash his hands ; 
' Gar loose to me the good gray dogs, 
That are bound wi' iron bands/ w * 



* Edom cf Gordon, Percy's Reliques, vol. i. p. 240. Johnle of 
Beardslee, Motherwell's Ancient and Modern Minstrelsy, vol. i. p. 169. 



152 



LECTURE FOURTH. 



The outlaw's mother, with a presentiment of his fate, 
entreats him to give over what was to prove a woful hunt- 
ing, but in vain ; and in spite of her forebodings and the 
terrors of the forest-laws, he goes forth. The rude and 
animated strain continues : 

" Beardslee shot, and the dun deer leap'd, 
And he wounded her in the side; 
But a'tween the water and the brae, 
His hounds, they laid her pride. 

And Beardslee has bryttled the deer so well, 

That he's had out her liver and lungs; 
And with these he has feasted his bloody hounds, 

As if they had been Earl's sons" 

The hunter and his dogs fall asleep, and are surprised 
by the foresters, who overpower him, and, after a desperate 
conflict, leave him dying in the lonely wood. The outlaw's 
breath passes away in a very gentle strain : 

" ! is there no a bonny bird 
Can sing as I can say, 
Would flee away to my mother's bower 
And tell to fetch Beardslee away. 

There 's no a bird in a* this forest 

Will do as mickle for me, 
As dip its wing in the wan water, 

And streak it on my e'e bree." 

Another characteristic of this poetry is the remarkable 
dramatic power that pervades it, the vividness of the dia- 
logue. This is shown in that, the finest specimen of all, 
which Coleridge called "the grand old ballad of Sir Patrick 
Spens."* It is a poem with a certain air of historical 



* Coleridge's Poems, Dejection, an Ode, p. 282. 



EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE. 



153 



interest, heightened by the mysterious uncertainty of its 
incidents, and remarkable both for the power of description 
and its depth of passion. It has come down from a re- 
mote antiquity, and has manifestly escaped the tampering 
of modern hands. Let me mention, respecting it, that 
after I had quoted it in a lecture of a former course, I was 
told by one of my very kind friends that I had carried 
him back to the days of his childhood in the old country, 
when he had heard this very ballad chaunted by the old 
Scotch people, who must have been familiar with it only 
by tradition, and not by books. I mention this incident, 
because it brought home to my mind most distinctly 
the manner in which the minstrel literature has been per- 
petuated.* 

When the earliest poetry of Greece, the mighty song 
of Homer, was a tradition from age to age, on the shores 
and the islands of the JEgean, with no surer abiding-place 
than the memories and the tongues of the Rhapsodists, 
the wisest of Athenian lawgivers, and one of the most 
politic of Athenian statesmen, made it a part of their wis- 
dom and their policy to gather the scattered poetry into 
safer keeping for the good of all after generations. No 
British Solon, no British Pisistratus, took like heed for 
Britain's early popular poetry. Doubtless, much of it has 
perished, and the names of the minstrels, like the names 



* " The very kind friend," to whom my brother refers, was the 
Reverend Doctor Wylie, for many years Vice Provost and Professor of 
Ancient Languages in the University of Pennsylvania, a man of great 
learning and eminent purity of character and feeling. He died in 1852. 
He was a native of the North of Ireland, and for many years pastor 
of the First Reformed Presbyterian Church in this city. He was a 
man beloved by all who knew him. W. B. R. 



154 



LECTURE FOURTH. 



of the great church architects of the Middle Ages, have 
perished utterly. They did their appointed work in their 
day and generation ; and again, when in the last century, 
(as I proprose to show at a later part of the course,) Eng- 
lish poetry became artificial, feeble, unreal, and sophisti- 
cated, the early song was revived, to breathe into it again 
health, and strength, and truth. 



LECTURE V. 

Dawn of letters a false illustration — Intellectual gloom from Edward 
III. to Henry VIII. — Chaucer to Spenser — Caxton and the art of 
printing — Civil wars — Wyatt and Surrey — The sonnet naturalized 
in English poetry — Blank verse — Henry VIII. — Edward VI. — 
Landor's sonnet — Sternhold and Hopkins — Bishop Latimer — Good- 
win Sands and Tenterden Steeple — " Bloody Mary" — Sackville — 
" The Mirror of Magistrates" — His career — Age of Elizabeth — Con- 
trasts of her life — The Church as an independent English power — 
Shakspeare — His journey to London — Final formation of the Eng- 
lish language — " The well of English undefiled" — The Reformation 
— Sir Philip Sydney — The Bishop's Bible — Richard Hooker — Spen- 
ser and Shakspeare — Wilson's Criticism — Sir Walter Raleigh — 
Shakspeare's Prose. 

In approaching the early English literature in my last 
lecture, I stated that, in forming a general notion of the 
extent of it, we may regard the era of our literature as a 
period of five centuries, from about 1350 to the present 
time — the middle of the fourteenth century down to the 
middle of the nineteenth. The student would, however, 
be misled, were he to believe as he might natu- 
rally do, that, during those five centuries, there was a 
continuous and uninterrupted progress, that the light of 
literature was faithfully handed from sire to son, and that 
new fires were kindled, in due succession, to light the 
new ages as the world moved on. Looking to that little 
island of our forefathers, we shall see, in its history, how 



* January 31, 1850. 



155 



156 LECTURE FIFTH. 

it travelled on with other lights flashing over it than the 
quiet illumination that shines from the studious watch- 
towers of poets and scholars. Such tranquil beams were, 
in many a year, dimmed by the fierce and lurid fires 
which war in its worst form, civil strife, and ecclesiastical 
persecutions were casting over the land. 

The familiar and well-known metaphor which has long 
designated Chaucer as the "Morning Star" of English 
poetry, while it is most apt in telling of that primal and 
fair shining in the eastern sky of our literature, is not so 
truthful in its relations to the later as to the earlier times. 
The light of day camre on too slowly ; and, indeed, a 
long night followed that early outbreak of the imagina- 
tion of England's first great poet. Nearly two centuries 
parsed before another arose worthy to take place beside 
him. Mr. Hallam's historical study of the progress of 
the European mind during the Middle Ages, has led him 
to remark, that "The trite metaphors of light and dark- 
ness, of dawn and twilight, are used carelessly by those 
who touch on the literature of the Middle Ages, and sug- 
gest, by analogy, an uninterrupted succession, in which 
learning, like the sun, has dissipated the shadows of bar- 
barism. But, with closer attention, it is easily seen that 
this is not a correct representation ; that taking Europe 
generally, far from being in a more advanced stage of 
learning at the beginning of the fifteenth century than 
two hundred years before, she had, in many respects, gone 
backward, and gave little sign of any tendency to recover 
her ground. There is, in fact, no security, as far as the 
past history of mankind assures us, that any nation will 
be uniformly progressive in science, arts, and letters ; nor 
do I perceive, whatever may be the current language, 



LITERATURE OF XVI. CENTURY. 



i57 



that we can expect this with much greater confidence of 
the whole civilized world." * 

One of the most remarkable relapses of the kind in 
intellectual advancement is the long interval between the 
death of Chaucer, in the year 1400, and the birth of the 
next of England's great poets, Edmund Spenser, in 1553, 
and the appearance of the earliest of the great English 
prose-writers in the latter part of the sixteenth century. 
This period of more than a century and a half is, com- 
paratively, a desolate tract of time; and, parting with 
Chaucer in the era of the Middle Ages, we gain com- 
panionship with no other master-spirit until, crossing the 
threshold of modern times, the year 1500, we find our- 
selves in the domain of the later civilization which suc- 
ceeds the thousand years that separate the Roman world 
from modern times. In this transition we pass, let it also 
be remembered, from the ages in which the thoughts of 
men and the oracles of God were recorded only by the 
slow labour of the pen — the stupendous toil which modern 
art may marvel at rather than despise — into the times 
which become, in some respects, a new intellectual era by 
the agency of printing. It was near a century after the 
death of Chaucer that the first of English printers 
died — the honoured William Caxton — whose life is to be 
thought of, like that of the Venerable Bede, as monitory 
of " perpetual industry f for, as the aged Saxon expired 
dictating the last words of a translation of St. John's 
Gospel — 

"In the hour of death, 
The last dear service of his parting breath," 



* Literature of Europe, chap. ii. q 49, vol. i. p. 173. 
14 



Wo 



LECTURE FIFTH. 



so did the old printer carry forward bis last labour, on a 
volume of sacred lore, to tbe last day of a life that bore 
its burden of four-score years. 

Having alluded to the familiar figure which is so often 
used to typify the position of the earliest of the great 
English authors, I may correct the error which might 
unawares be connected with it by another metaphor, 
which the memory can easily keep hold on. "With a 
beauty of illustration, which does not often adorn the 
pages of Warton's History of English Poetry, he happily 
compares the appearance of Chaucer in the language to a 
premature day in spring, after which the gloom of winter 
returns, and the buds and blossoms, which have been 
called forth by a transient sunshine, are nipped by frosts 
and scattered by storms.* 

Difficult as it may be to discover in the history of the 
human mind why, at particular periods, it bursts forth with 
such power, and at other times lies so torpid, we may 
trace with some confidence causes which at least help to 
account for this long and dismal blank between the reign 
of Edward the Third and that of Queen Elizabeth — the 
whole of the fifteenth century, and a large part of the six- 



* "I consider Chaucer as a genial day in an English spring. A bril- 
liant sun enlivens the face of nature with an unusual lustre ; the sudden 
appearance of cloudless skies, and the unexpected warmth of a tepid 
atmosphere, after the gloom and inclemencies of a tedious winter, fill 
our hearts with the visionary prospects of a speedy summer; and we 
fondly anticipate along continuance of gentle gales and vernal serenity. 
But winter returns with redoubled horrors ,• the clouds condense more 
formidably than before ; and those tender buds, and early blossoms, 
which were called forth by the transient gleam of a temporary sun- 
shine, are nipped by frost and torn by tempests." Warton, vol. ii. 
p. 51. W. B. R. 



LITERATURE OF XVI. CENTURY. 



159 



teenth : seven reigns of disputed legitimacy, thirty years 
of civil slaughter, first brutalizing and then crushing the 
nation's heart, the bloody variance of a feudal nobility, a 
long series of battles, so fierce in their vengeance that the 
very flowers, the innocent flowers, were torn from the once 
peaceful gardens to be made the emblems of unrelenting 
warfare; and then, when these evils had passed away, 
there came the darker strife of a nation's distracted 
church-persecution and the fiery terrors of the stake. 

Chaucer had outlived the superb reign of Edward the 
Third, with its half century of lofty dominion. He had 
seen the miserable ending of Edward's giddy grandson, 
the second Richard, thrust from his throne by " mounting 
Bolingbroke." The cycle of the fortune of these Lan- 
castrian Plantagenets, reaching its highest splendour in the 
foreign victories of the fifth Henry, had its sad completion 
in the disasters of the next reign, and the tragic death of 
the last of the house of Lancaster. The heart of the nation 
was suffering the grievous wasting of all that might have 
been dear to it, by tfie evil passions engendered in that 
most deplorable of all political and social conditions, civil 
warfare; a strife always the fiercest and most unrelenting, 
for, the ties once broken, which had bound men together 
by the unconscious bonds of instinctive feelings, bewildered 
humanity looks on the once dearest friend as the direst 
foe. "The bells in the church steeples/' writes an old 
church historian, " were not heard for the sound of drums 
and trumpets/'* The learned were not listened to, or 
rather were hushed into silence, and the humanizing 
music of poetry was unknown. How could the intellect 



* Fuller ; vol. i. p. 54. 



160 



LECTURE FIFTH. 



adventure any thing when the heart was appalled ! How 
could the imagination aspire when overwhelmed by thv 
dark and fearful pressure of the present ! 

Thus passed one hundred years of the century and a 
half which lies between that genial age in which Chaucei 
flourished, and the other more genial era ; that of the 
Elizabethan literature. 

In looking at the early part of the sixteenth century 
- — nearly the first half of it occupied by the reign of 
Henry VIII.— it is pleasing to find some literary interest 
in a period which is associated chiefly with ecclesiastical 
change and the second Tudor' s domestic tyranny. An 
abiding impression on the nation's literature was made at 
that time by two writers, whose names from early and long 
association are scarce separable— men of noble birth and 
character — Sir Thomas Wyatt, the lover of Anne Boleyn, 
and Henry Howard, the ill-fated Earl of Surrey. Surrey, 
especially, is esteemed as one of the improvers of Eng- 
lish verse. Acquainted with the refinements of Italian 
verse, acquired either by personal intercourse or by study, 
he introduced important changes into that of England. 
The language was made at once more graceful and simple ) 
and Italian forms of verse introduced. The Sonnet was 
naturalized into English poetry ; to disclose in later times 
that wondrous variety of power and of beauty which has 
been proved, within its narrow limits, by Milton and by 
Wordsworth. The English versification was more exactly 
disciplined ; and to Surrey is due the merit of having 
given the first example of blank verse; that form which has 
so eminently adapted itself to the language and to the 
English poet's desires, that it has been well said to deserve 
the name of " the English metre;" a construction which 



LITERATURE OF XVI. CENTURY. 



m 



from time to time has been revealing the musical re- 
sources of its unexhausted variety, in the dramatic lan- 
guage of Shakspeare, the epic of the Paradise Lost, in 
the homelier strains of the Task, in the heroic romance 
of Koderic, and in the philosophy of the Excursion. 
Such is our English blank-verse, alike it may be to the 
eye, but wonderfully varied to the ear, and to that inner 
spiritual sense which seems, even more than the organ of 
hearing, to take cognizance of the music of poetry ) and 
admitting, too, of some characteristic impress from the 
genius of every great poet that has used it. 

There gathered round this noble poet all that could 
dignify and endear him to his own times and to after 
times — a lofty lineage, rank, genius, virtue, loyalty, faith- 
ful and honourable services ; but for his bright career as 
scholar, courtier, soldier, there was a dark destiny of blood. 
In our earliest knowledge of English history, one of the 
first and most vivid impressions is that which we have of 
the household atrocities of the eighth Henry — to a child's 
fancy, the British Bluebeard — driving to divorce or death 
his wives, the mothers of his children, and devoting more 
than one fair neck, once fondly embraced, to the bloody 
handling of the headsman. What reign, in the range 
of history, more execrable ! and the last act of it cast a 
shadow on the annals of English literature. Henry 
Howard had been in childhood an inmate of the palace, a 
playmate of royal children ; and when he grew to manhood 
he was a loyal and honoured courtier, a brave and trusted 
soldier. But it was Surrey's crime, his only crime, to 
bear the name of Howard, a name which had newly grown 
hateful to the despot's ear. He was committed, on a 
charge of treason, to the Tower; and in the very week 

14* 



162 



LECTURE FIFTH. 



in which Henry VIII. died, the gallant Surrey, at 
the age of twenty-seven, laid down his head upon the 
scaffold. 

Let me add a vivid description of the close of Henry\* 
reign, and its connection with Howard's tragic end, to 
fix the memory of this early author by the help of the 
dread association. 

"It is fearful/' says the author from whom I quote, 
"but not unsalutary, to cast a parting glance at the vicious 
body of Henry VIII. after its work upon the earth was 
done. It lay, immovable and helpless, a mere corrupt 
and bloated mass of tyranny. No friend was near to com- 
fort it; not even a courtier dared to warn it of its coming 
hour. The men alone it had gorged with the offal of its 
plunder, hurry back in affright from its perishing agonies, 
in disgust from its ulcerous sores. It could not move a 
limb nor lift a hand. The palace-doors were made wider 
for its passage through them ; and it could only then pass 
by means of machinery. Yet to the last it kept its ghastly 
state, descended daily from bed-chamber into room of 
kingly audience through a hole in the palace ceiling, and 
was nightly, by the same means, lifted back again to its 
sleepless bed. And to the last, unhappily for the world, 
it had its terrible indulgences. Before stretched in that 
helpless state of horror, its latest victim had been a Plan- 
tagenet. Nearest to itself in blood of all its living kindred, 
the Countess of Salisbury was, in her eightieth year, 
dragged to the scaffold for no pretended crime, save that 
of corresponding with her son; and having refused to lay 
her head upon the block, (it was for traitors to do so, she 
said, 6 and she was none/) but moving swiftly round, and 
tossing it from side to side to avoid the execution, she 



LITERATURE OF XVI. CENTURY. 



163 



was struck clown by the weapons of the neighbouring men- 
at-arms, and while her gray hairs streamed with blood, 
and her neck was forcibly held down, the axe discharged, 
at length, its dreadful office. The last victim of all 
followed in the graceful and gallant person of the young 
Lord Surrey. The dying tyranny, speechless and inca* 
pable of motion, had its hand lifted up to affix the formal 
seal to the death-warrant of the poet, the soldier, the 
statesman, and scholar, and on ' the day of the execution/ 
according to Hollinshed, was itself ( lying in the agonies 
of death/ Its miserable comfort, then, was the thought 
that youth was dying too ; that the grave which yawned 
for abused health, indulged lusts, and monstrous crimes 
had, in the same instant, opened at the feet of manly 
health, of generous grace, of exquisite genius, and model 
virtue. And so perished Henry VIII."* 

We pass on from the long and odious reign of the sire 
to the short rule of his innocent and tender-hearted son, 

" King, child, and seraph, blended in the mien 
Of pious Edward."f 

As the mind passes from this detested father to his son — 
gentle Jane Sey mour's gentle son — one cannot but think 
how it exemplifies the truth which Landor's lines have 
told : 

" Children are what the mothers are. 
No fondest father's wisest care 
Can fashion so the infant heart, 
As those creative beams that dart, 
With all their hopes and fears, upon 
The cradle of a sleeping son. 



* Forster's Treatise on Popular Progress, 
f Wordsworth's Coll. Ed. p. 301. 



m 



His startled eyes with wonder see 
A father near him on his knee, 
Who wishes all the while to trace 
The mother in his future face; 
But 'tis to her alone uprise 
His wakening arms, to her those eyes 
Open with joy, and not surprise."* 

Another copartnership in letters, closer than that of 
Surrey and Wyatt, and suggesting another kind of as- 
sociations, may be noticed in that part of the sixteenth 
century which belongs to the reign of Edward VI. I 
refer to the first version of the Psalms of David in 
English metre, produced by two writers — whose names 
have become the symbols of dulness and clumsy versifi- 
cation — Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins. Un- 
doubtedly the grandeur of the Hebrew Psalmody is very 
inadequately represented in the flat and prosaic diction 
and the awkward metres of these two good men ; but it 
should be remembered that a worthy translation of the 
Psalms into English metre has never yet been achieved; 
and, indeed, the best judges make question of the possi- 
bility of such version. If this old version, three hundred 



* Mr. Landor's poems are so scattered, and in their modes of publi- 
cation so fugitive, that they must often be quoted at second-hand. I 
find these verses marked with my brother's pencil in a little French 
volume called, "La Petite Chouannerie, ou Histoired'un College Breton 
sous l'Empire, par A. F. Bio," p. 296. I am tempted to put on these 
pages the following lines, by Landor, on Charles Lamb, which ap- 
peared during the present year in the Examiner newspaper: 
" Candid old man ! what youth was in thy years ! 

What wisdom in thy levity ! what truth 

In every utterance of that purest soul ! 

Few are the spirits of the glorified 

I'd spring to earlier at the gates of heaven !" W. B. R. 



LITERATURE OF XVI. CENTURY. 



165 



years ago, is rude and uncouth, honourable testimony has 
been borne to its fidelity to the Hebrew original. The 
version of later times, now most in use, is at once tame 
and tawdry, (worse faults than rudeness,) taking, too, larger 
license with the original, and " generally," it is said, " sacri- 
ficing altogether the direct, lightning-like force of the 
inspired sentences."* 

Much of Sternhold and Hopkins's version would cer- 
tainly now so affect the dainty modern ear, as to give a 
sense of ridicule most incongruous to the theme ; but the 
reproach that rests on the old version may be lightened a 
little, when we meet with a stanza like this : 

u The Lord descended from above, and bowed the heavens most high, 
And underneath his feet he cast the darkness of the sky; 
On cherub and on cherubim full royally he rode, 
And on the wings of mighty winds came flying all abroad."f 

However rude this version was, it has a claim to re- 
spect as the first that fitted to English lips the music of 
the royal inspired singer; and as the homely verses were, 
years after, familiarized in the people's devotions, the 
imagery of the Hebrew poetry was sinking into the hearts 
of the men of England, and helping to form that sacred 
character which is the glory of all the highest inspirations 
of English poetry. 

The progress of English prose, as it was slowly ad- 
vancing to its best estate, appears, at the period I have 
been speaking of, in the sermons of him whose intrepid 
spirit and cheerful constancy sustained him in the hour of 

* Keble. 

f Psalm xviii. 9, 10. It is to be observed that more modern para- 
phrasers of the Psalms have generally shrunk from rendering the&o 
verses into their slender English. W. B. R. 
L 



166 



LECTURE FIFTH 



.nartyrdom — Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester. It 
was in a sermon preached before Edward VI. that he in- 
troduced, in accordance with the quaint pulpit-oratory of 
the times, the well-known illustration of the Goodwin 
Sands and Tenterden Steeple, in reply to a very common 
fallacy ; and the passage may be quoted to show the cha- 
racter of the prose, which was then equal, at least, to 
simple purposes of natural narrative : 

" Here was preaching," he says, " against covetousness 
all the last year in Lent, and the next summer followed 
rebellion ; ergo preaching 6 against' covetousness was the 
cause of rebellion. A goodly argument ! 

" Here, now, I remember an argument of Master 
More's, which he bringeth in a book that he made against 
Bilney ; and here, by the way, I will tell you a merry 
toy. Master More was once sent in commission into Kent, 
to help to try out, if it might be, what was the cause of 
Goodwin Sands and the shelf that stopped up Sandwich 
Haven. Thither cometh Master More, and calleth the 
country afore him — such as were thought to be men of 
experience, and men that could, of likelihood, best certify 
him of the matter concerning the stopping of Sandwich 
Haven. Among others, came in before him an old man 
with a white head, and one that was thought to be little 
less than an hundred years old. When Master More 
saw this aged man, he thought it expedient to hear him 
say his mind in the matter ; for, being so old a man, it 
was likely he knew most of any man in that presence 
and company. So Master More called this old aged man 
unto him and said, c Father/ said he, ( tell me, if ye can, 
what is the cause of this great arising of the sands and 
shelves here about this haven, the which stop it up that 



LITERATURE OF XVI. CENTURf. 



16T 



no ships can arrive here ? Ye are the eldest man that I 
can espy in all this company, so that if any man can tell 
any cause of it, ye, of likelihood, can say most in it, or, 
at leastwise, more than any other man here assembled/ 
i Yea, forsooth, good master/ quoth this old man, 1 for 1 
am well-nigh an hundred years old, and no man here in 
this company any thing near unto mine age/ 1 Well, 
then/ quoth Master More, 6 how say you in this matter ? 
What think ye to be the cause of these shelves and flats 
that stop up Sandwich Haven V 1 Forsooth/ quoth he, 
1 1 am an old man ; I think that Tenterden Steeple is the 
cause of Goodwin Sands. For I am an old man, sir/ 
quoth he, 6 and I may remember the building of Tenter- 
den Steeple, and I may remember when there was no 
steeple at all there. And before that Tenterden Steeple 
was in building, there was no manner of speaking of any 
flats or sands that stopped the haven ; and, therefore, I 
think that Tenterden Steeple is the cause of the destroy- 
ing and the decay of Sandwich Haven/ And even so, to 
my purpose, is preaching of God's word the cause of re- 
bellion, as Tenterden Steeple was cause Sandwich Haven 
is decayed/' 

There is one sentence of English words uttered by this 
same divine, which has a deeper and more enduring inte- 
rest, and that was when he and Eidley stood in their 
dread fellowship of martyrdom at the stake; when the 
fagot, kindled with fire, was brought and laid at Ridley's 
feet, Latimer, happy, as the martyr's crown was poised 
above his brow, on which four-score years had placed their 
crown of glory, spake in this manner: "Be of good 
cheer, Master Eidley, and play the man ; we shall this 



168 



LECTURE FIFTH. 



day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as 7 
I trust, shall never be put out."* 

The gentle Edward's reign had too quickly given place 
to his sister's — that hateful reign — when the palace of 
England's monarchs grew dark with the power of the 
detested Spaniard, and the long list of martyrs fastened 
forever the title of "blood" to the sweetest of female 
names. Just at the close of Queen Mary's reign, Eng- 
lish literature produced one work, showing a force of 
imagination which would have placed its author in the 
highest rank of our poets, had he not turned his genius 
away from poetic study to devote it, during a very long 
life, to the political service of his country. " The Mir- 
ror of Magistrates" is the title of a work planned by 
Thomas Sackville — Lord Buckhurst — and intended to 
comprise a series of poetic narratives of the disasters of 
men eminent in English story. The first of these, on the 
Duke of Buckingham, with the preface, or " Induc- 
tion," as it is styled, was all that was accomplished ; but 
those four hundred lines displayed an inventive energy 
which was a foreshadowing of the allegorical imagination 
which soon after rose in "The Faery Queen." Sack- 
ville' s Induction stands as the chief, the only great poem 
between the times of Chaucer and of Spenser. Allego- 
rical poetry presents no more vivid imagination than his 
personification of war, or of old age, in that single line 

" His withered fist still striking at death's door." 

What a gloomy conception was the plan of the poem ! 
It has been likened to a landscape which the sun never 
shines on. More than that might be said, when we think 



* Life of Latimer, prefixed to his Sermons, vol. i. p. clvii. 



LITERATURE OF XVI. CENTURY. 



162 



how congenial it was to the time of its composition. 
There hung on Sackville's genius not only a dark gloom, 
but it may be thought to have caught a ghastly com- 
plexion from the lurid lights of the flames of religious 
persecution. We may picture this thoughtful poet, turn- 
ing his footsteps beyond the confines of London, on a 
winter's day, the dreary season described at the opening 
of the poem 

" Wandering till nightfall, 
The darke had dimm'd the day ere I was 'ware." 

And what was the spectacle he might have encountered ? 
The dispersing throng that had just gathered round the 
stake, where flames had wrapped a martyr's body, the fire not 
yet burnt out in the smouldering ashes; perhaps the deso- 
late family, the outcast wife and children, lingering near 
the spot where a spiritual hero had sealed his faith. It 
was a fit season for poetry's darkest imaginings, and well 
might Sackville frame his gloomy personification of sor- 
row to guide him in fancy into the realms of death, to 
hear there, from the lips of the dead, the stories of their 
woes. Under this dreary guidance, his genius entered 
into the shadowy domains of imagination ; but soon after 
he brought the powers of his mind forth into the world's 
political service, in which he continued during the whole 
of Elizabeth's reign, and part of that of her successor, 
when the hand of death was laid upon the veteran states- 
man suddenly, at the council-board of James I. It is a 
remarkable fact that, in actual life, he personally witnessed 
two reverses of fortune — political downfalls transcending 
any his tragic muse could have called up in his mournful 
poem. Sackville was one of the judicial tribunal which 
pronounced the doom of Mary Stuart : it was from his 

15 



170 



"LECTURE FIFTH. 



lips that the unhappy Queen received the message of her 
doom ; and it was part of his stern duty to behold the last 
look of that royal fair one, the " long array of woes and 
degradations' } at length closing, and to witness the blow 
which severed from a now wasted body the head that once 
had glittered with the diadems of France and of Scotland. 
It was also Lord Buckhurst's lot (and these were per- 
haps the only two calamities of his long and honourable 
career) to sit in judgment on the Earl of Essex, when that 
nobleman fell from his high place of queenly favour. 

The reign of Mary was followed by a period more pro- 
pitious to the national literature, in the latter part of the 
sixteenth century. That half century, almost entire, was the 
time of her sister's reign. In styling it the Elizabethan 
literature, there is a propriety beyond mere chronological 
convenience, for the influences of her reign were in mani- 
fold ways favourable to the development of the mind, to 
the expression of thought and feeling. The heart of the 
sovereign beat with the heart of the people ; and chivalry 
mingled with loyalty to do honour to the woman-monarch. 
Such was the predominant feeling, passing, indeed, often 
into the extravagance of adulation, but outlasting all her 
pomp and powers; for, in the preface to our English ver- 
sion of the Bible she stands recorded in the glowing 
phrase, "that bright occidental star, Queen Elizabeth, of 
most happy memory." In her sway, there was a magna- 
nimity, which she had learned not in the luxuries of regal 
childhood, but in the school of adversity and a doubtful 
destiny. History presents no finer contrast than between 
those two days of her life : the first, when, a culprit on 
suspicion of treason, she was brought in custody along 
the Thames, to be committed to the Tower, and perceiving 



LITERATURE OF XVI. CENTURY. 



171 



that the barge was steering to the traitor's gate, she re- 
fused to enter that guilty portal, and in the utter destitu- 
tion of a young and unfriended woman, called God to wit- 
ness she was innocent ) when the first intelligence that 
reached her as a prisoner was that the scaffold had 
already drunk the blood of a meeker victim, the Lady 
Jane Grey, and she knew it was thirsting for hers. After a 
few, though weary and dismal years, she was again an inmate 
of the ancient fortress of the metropolis, but it was to go 
forth the Queen of a rejoicing nation, surrounded by cohorts 
of her devoted nobles, and multitudes of a happy people ; and 
when before the crown was set upon her brow, lifting her 
eyes to heaven, she poured forth her fervid thankfulness to 
the Almighty for his wondrous dealings, for his won- 
drous mercies. " Wherever she moved," says the record of 
this the first of her magnificent progresses, " it was to be 
greeted by the prayers, the shouts, the tender words, and 
uplifted hands of the people : to such as bade 6 God save 
your grace/ she said again, ' God save you all;' so that on 
either side there was nothing but gladness, nothing but 
prayer, nothing but comfort."* 

Such was the fit opening of a reign for which was des- 
tined the highest glory that has dwelt with the nation's 
language and literature. An impulse was given by the 
civil and ecclesiastical condition of the realm, for it 
abounded in all that could cheer and animate a nation's 
heart. There was repose from the agony of spiritual per- 
secution, submission to Rome was at an end, and the 
church in England was once more standing on its ancient 



* Hollinshed, as quoted in Miss Strickland's " Queens cf England/' 
vol. vL chap, iv, p. 127, Am. ed. 



172 



LECTURE FIFTH. 



British foundations. It mattered little what foreign dan- 
ger threatened, for there was the proud sense of national 
independence and national power, its moral force greater 
even than its physical. I have spoken this evening of 
wars, like the wars of York and Lancaster, fraternal feuds, 
which waste and harden a nation's heart; but there are 
wars of another kind which animate that heart with a 
high enthusiasm, a truth well proclaimed in a strain of 
lyrical poetry, fitting the ebb and flow which belong to 
that species of song to truth's varied aspects : 

"War is passion's basest game, 
Madly played to win a name. 

* * * * 

War is mercy, glory, fame, 

Waged in freedom's holy cause, 
Freedom such as man may claim, 

Under God's restraining laws."* 

The same year in which Shakspeare is supposed to 
have gone up from Stratford to London was a proud one 
in his country's annals, for it was then that stout hearts 
and the stormy alliance of the ocean saved the soil from 
the pollution of foreign invasion, and the boastful attempt 
of the Spaniard, whose hateful presence in the palace 
when he shared the throne was not forgotten, and who 
was coming now with the terrors of the Inquisition in 
his train. When the scattered remnants of the Armada 
were driven, not back to the ports of Spain, but as far 
north as the stormy latitude of the Hebrides, there must 
have been a high and general fervour kindling each heart; 
and none more so than the large heart that beat in the 



* Wordsworth's Ode on the Installation of Prince Albert as Chan- 
cellor of the University of Cambridge, in 1847. 



LITERATURE OF XVI. CENTURY. 



173 



breast of William Shakspeare. An intense nationality, 
and a happy loyalty to the government, as represented in 
the sovereign- — fervid as were these emotions in the days 
of Queen Elizabeth — could not but affect vividly the 
national literature, especially the dramatic literature, 
placed as it was in close contact with the people. This 
influence is manifest in Spenser, in Shakspeare, in Ben 
Jonson, and all the great authors of the time; and doubt- 
less it was one of the causes that helped them to their 
greatness. 

The English language, too, was now better fitted for 
all the uses of literature, more adequate to the needs of 
philosophic thought, and of deep and varied feeling — at 
once stronger, more flexible, and more copious. It was 
now flowing one mighty flood, no longer showing the 
separate colours of the two streams which filled its 
channel — colours caught from the different soils, the 
Saxon and the Norman, in which they had their springs. 
The hidden harmonies of the language were disclosed, 
and its power of more varied music shown. The people's 
speech had grown to its full stature.* The language 
became affluent in expressions incorporated with it from 
the literature of antiquity, for classical learning in its 

* Dr. Johnson, in the preface to his Dictionary, a work demanding 
his gigantic powers and congenial to them, has admirably remarked, 
that "From the authors which arose in the time of Elizabeth, a speech 
might be formed adequate to all the purposes of use and elegance. If 
the language of theology were extracted from Hooker and the trans- 
lation of the Bible; the terms of natural knowledge from Bacon; tho 
phrases of policy, war, and navigation from Raleigh; the dialect of 
poetry and fiction from Spenser and Sydney; and the diction of com- 
mon life from Shakspeare, — few ideas would be lost to mankind, for 
waDt of English words in which they might be expressed/' H. B. 

15* 



174 LECTURE FIFTH. 

best forms was rnade, as it were, part of the mind of 
modern Europe; and in England, under Elizabeth, the 
great universities, which during the immediately previous 
reigns had suffered from violence that had pierced even 
those tranquil abodes, were gathering anew their scattered 
forces. The attainments of the Queen herself, gained by 
the superior education which Henry VIII. had the sagacity 
to give his daughters, (it is one of the few good things to 
be said of him,) created another sympathy between the 
sovereign and her subjects. Beside the influence of 
ancient literature, necessarily limited to the learned, there 
was the larger and more open influence of the nation's 
own older literature — Chaucer's poetry dear to the peo- 
ple, and honoured by his grateful successors — for it was 
to Chaucer, let it be remembered, that Spenser applies the 
well-known phrase, the " well of English undefiled." 
There was the early romance, and that strange expres- 
sion of the mediaeval mind, the "Mysteries" and "Mo- 
ralities," " Miracle Plays" — that allegorical drama, in 
which abstractions were personified, and the actors were 
such things as "Pride," "Gluttony," " Swift-to-Sin," 
" Charity," and, what might perhaps be the more appro- 
priate personifications for later times, " Learning-without- 
money," and "Money-without-learning," and "All-for- 
money." In the great controversy of the Reformation, 
these devices for edification were freely employed by both 
divisions of the church to promote their respective 
opinions. An act of parliament in the reign of Henry 
VIII., for the promotion of true religion, forbade all in- 
terludes contradictory to established doctrines. In the 
preparatory processes of the Elizabethan literature, there 
was also the early minstrelsy in all its forms, tales told 



LITERATURE OF XVI. CENTURY. 



175 



by the fireside in the long English winter evenings, and 
songs sung, as Shakspeare speaks of, by women as they 
sat spinning and knitting in the sun. How deep was the 
influence of the popular minstrelsy, is apparent from that 
well-known sentence of Sir Philip Sydney : "I never heard 
the old song of Percie and Douglas, that I found not my 
heart moved more than with a trumpet ; and yet it is 
sung but by some blinde crowder, with no rougher voice 
than rude style; which being so evil apparelled in the 
dust and cobweb of that uncivil age, what would it work, 
trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar ?"* Syd- 
ney's feeling becomes still more intelligible when we re- 
call how the same strain clung to the heart of Walter 
Scott, (it was his favourite of the old ballads :) when 
visiting the ruined castle of Douglas, feeling the sure 
approaches of death, he repeated to Lockhart the old 
poem, the pathos of the last stanza having an applica- 
tion not to be mistaken, and leaving him in tears : 

" My wound is deep — I fain would sleep — 

Take' thou the vanguard of the three, 
And hide me beneath the bracken bush 

That grows on yonder lilylee. 
This deed was done at the Otterbourne, 

About the dawning of the day ; 
Earl Douglas was buried at the bracken bush, 

And the Percy led captive away."f 

Thus, as I have sought to show, there were propitious 
influences, from the past and of the present, which gave 
to our language the most illustrious period of its litera- 
ture — that which is usually called the " Elizabethan,' 7 



* Defence of Poesy, p. 34. Oxford ed. 1829. 
f Lockhart's Scott, vol. x. p. 86. 



176 



LECTURE FIFTH. 



passing over into the seventeenth century. First in it, 
was the English version of the Bible ; for, although the 
present standard is that of King James, published in 
1611, it belongs more properly in the history of English 
literature to an earlier period, modelled, as the new trans- 
lation was, after Archbishop Parker's, commonly called 
" The Bishop's Bible/' of the year 1568. The first of 
the instructions given to the translators in King James's 
time, was, " The ordinary Bible read in the churches, 
commonly called the Bishop's Bible, to be followed, and 
as little altered as the original will permit." We may, 
therefore, associate the language of our Bibles more truly 
with the age of Elizabeth than with that of the first of 
the Stuarts. To the same period belongs the first of the 
great English prose-writers, Richard Hooker, the earliest 
of that unbroken series of authors, during the last two 
hundred and fifty years, who have shown the resources of 
our English prose; Bacon, Taylor, Milton, and Barrow, Dry- 
den, Bolingbroke, Swift, and Burke, Johnson, Goldsmith, 
and Cowper, and, in our own times, Scott and Southey, 
Sydney Smith and Landor. Mr. Hallam, in his Consti- 
tutional History, turns aside from his subject to express 
his deep sense of the claims which Hooker, as the author 
of the " Ecclesiastical Polity," has " to be counted among 
the great luminaries of English literature. He not only 
opened the mind, but explored the depths of our native 
eloquence. So stately and graceful is the march of his 
periods, so various the fall of his musical cadences upon the 
ear, so rich in images, so condensed in sentences, so grave 
and noble his diction, so little is there of vulgarity in 
his racy idiom, of pedantry in his learned phrase, that I 
1 now not whether any later writer has more admirably 



LITERATURE OP XVI. CENTURY. 



IT! 



displayed the capacities of our language, or produced pas- 
sages more worthy of comparison with the splendid monu- 
ments of antiquity." * 

The chief glory, however, of the Elizabethan age, is 
its poetry, at once the most abundant and the highest in 
the annals of English literature. No fewer than two 
hundred poets are referred to the period by a cata- 
logue which, by good authority, is thought not to exceed 
the true number. But it is not number alone. There are 
the names of Edmund Spenser and of William Shaks- 
peare. 

When Spenser, in 1590, gave to the world the first 
books of " The Faery Queen/' it was done in a manner 
worthy of the age and of his great inspiration. It was 
dedicated to his Queen — " The most high, mighty, and 
* magnificent empress, renowned for piety, virtue, and all 
gracious government, Elizabeth, by the grace of God, 
Queen of England, France, and Ireland, and Virginia." 
Yes, there stands the name of that honoured State; and, 
while there is many a reason for the lofty spirit of her 
sons, the pulse of their pride may beat higher at the sight 
of the record of " the ancient dominion" on the first page 
of the Faery Queen. The poet placed it there as a tri- 
bute to her from whom the name was taken, and also to 
the gallant enterprise of Raleigh and his adventurous 
followers. 

The poem is ushered in not only by the dedication to the 
sovereign, but by a series of introductory verses addressed 
to the most illustrious statesmen and soldiers of the court, 
Hatton, and Burleigh, and Essex, Howard, Walsingham, 



* Hallam's Constitutional History of England, vol. i. p. 291. 



178 



LECTURE FIFTH. 



and Raleigh — to Bnckhurst, (whose own muse was slumber- 
ing now;) and not only to these, the living men of power and 
place, but, with a truth of affection worthy of the poet's 
gentle spirit, to the mourning sister of his lost friend, Sir 
Philip Sydney, and closing with an address, full of the 
chivalry of the times, " to all the gratious and beautiful 
ladies in the court. " 

Having occasion now to hasten to a few other subjects, 
I propose to reserve what I wish to say of the Faery Queen, 
until the next lecture, when I desire to speak of Spenser 
as a sacred poet, in connection with some counsel on the 
subject of Sunday reading. At present, let me recommend 
that remarkable series of papers from the pen of Professor 
John Wilson — the Christopher North of Blackwood't 
Magazine — papers of the highest value as pieces of trm 
imaginative criticism, written with such a glowing admi- 
ration of Spenser's genius, that I know of no better meany 
than the perusal of them for extending the study of this 
great allegory. They are to be found in Blackwood's 
Magazine for 1833. 

The large luminary of Spenser's imagination had scarce 
mounted high enough above the horizon to kindle all it 
touched, when there arose the still more glorious shape of 
Shakspeare's genius, radiant like Milton's seraph — "another 
morn risen on mid-noon/' This was the wonderful dra- 
matic era in English letters. Within about fifty years, 
beginning in the latter part of the sixteenth century, there 
was a concourse of dramatic authors, the like of which is 
seen nowhere else in literary history. The central figure 
is Shakspeare, towering above them all; but there wth-e 
there, Ben Jonson, and Beaumont, and Fletcher, a>*d 
Ford ; and a multitude of whom a poet has said, 



LITERATURE OF XVI. CENTURY. 



179 



" They stood around 
The throne of Shakspeare, sturdy, but unclean."* 

Their productions were numerous : one of them, Heywood, 
speaks of having had a share in the authorship of two 
hundred and twenty plays, of which only twenty-five have 
been preserved. They often worked, too, in fellowship, 
such as linked the names of Francis Beaumont and John 
Fletcher forever together — a beautiful literary companion- 
ship, the secret of which seems to be lost in the more cal- 
culating selfishness of later times. 

It is scarce possible, it seems to me, to mistake that 
this abundant development of dramatic poetry was cha- 
racteristic of times distinguished by the admirable union 
of action and contemplation in many of the illustrious 
men who flourished then; for instance, Sir Philip Sydney 
devoting himself to the effort of raising English poetry to 
its true estate, kindling his heart with the old ballads, or 
drawing the gentle Spenser forth from the hermitage ot 
his modesty; at the same time sharing in affairs of state, 
in knights' deeds of arms, and on the field of battle meet- 
ing an early death, memorable with its last deed of charity, 
when, putting away the cup of water from his own lips burn 
ing with the thirst of a bleeding death, he gave it to a 
wounded soldier with the words, " Thy necessity is yet 
greater than mine or Raleigh preserving his love of 
letters throughout his whole varied career, at court, in 
camp, or tempest-tost in his adventures on the ocean. It 
seems to me that an age thus characterized by the combi- 
nation of thought and deed in its representative men, had 
its most congenial literature in the drama — that form of 



* Walter Savage Landor. 



t80 



LECTURE FIFTH. 



poetry which Lord Bacon has described as "history made 
visible." 

I have said little of the greatest name that adorns the 
literature of the age of Elizabeth and the few succeeding 
years, and have now left myself no space to speak of what 
demands such ample room as comment on Shakspeare. 
It is a field that has been of late very much travelled 
over. Its interest, if truly sought, can never be exhausted. 
There is a mere chance that I may be pointing your atten- 
tion to what has not attracted it before, when I ask 
whether you have ever noticed the power of Shakspeare 
peculiarly as a writer of English prose. Of its kind, it is 
as admirable as his poetic language. It is interspersed 
through his plays, never introduced probably without some 
exquisite art in the transition from verse to prose, from 
metrical to unmetrical diction. Let us for a few minutes 
look at this subject, and I will place side by side two 
nassages, counterpart in some measure in subject; first, 
of verse, that familiar passage on the music of the spheres, 
which Hallarn's calm judgment pronounced " perhaps the 
most sublime in Shakspeare 



* Hallarn's Literature of Europe, chap. iii. g 11, vol. iii. p. 147. It 
is difficult to refrain from quoting, hackneyed as they are, the lines 
which immediately precede those, in the text, the playful dialogue of 
the Venetian lovers, ending with the solemn, reverential outburst of 
Lorenzo, as, turning from the bright, mortal eyes of his mistress, he 
looks up to the stars of heaven. There are some lines of Shelly, on 
Night, which do not suffer in comparison with any thing since the 
Merchant of Venice : 

" How beautiful this Night ! the balmiest sigh 
Which vernal zephyrs breathe in morning's ear, 
Were discord to the speaking quietude 



LITERATURE OE XVI. CENTURY, 



183 



" Look, how the floor of heaven 
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold ! 
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st 
But in his motion like an angel sings, 
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubim. 
Such harmony is in immortal souls : 
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay 
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it." 

Whose prose but Shakspeare's could stand by the side 
of such verse? I turn to an equally familiar passage in 
Hamlet: "I have of late (but wherefore, I know not) 
lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercise : and, 
indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition, that this 
goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory : 
this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave 
o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with 
golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a 
foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece 
of work is a man ! How noble in reason ! How infinite 



That wraps this moveless scene. Heaven's ebon arch, 
Studded with stars unutterably bright, 
Through which the moon's unclouded splendour rolls, 
Seems like a canopy which love has spread 
To curtain her sleeping world. Yon gentle hills, 
Robed in a garment of untrodden snow: 
Yon darksome rocks, whence icicles depend, 
So stainless that their white and glittering spires 
Tinge not the moon's pale beam; yon castled steep, 
Whose banner hangeth o'er the time-worn tower 
So idly, that wrapt fancy deemeth it 
A metaphor of Peace, — all form a scene 
Where musing solitude might love to lift 
Her soul above this sphere of earthliness : 
Where silence undisturbed might walk alone, 
So cold, so bright, so still." W. B. R. 
M U 



182 



LECTURE FIFTH. 



in faculties ! in form and moving, how express and admi- 
rable ! in action, how like an angel ! in apprehension, 
how like a god ! the beauty of the world ! the paragon of 
animals ! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of 
dust ? Man delights not me, nor woman neither, though, 
by your smiling, you seem to say so." 

Now let me exemplify a quick transition from prose to 
verse : when Coriolanus is soliciting the plebeian votes, 
citizens tell him he has not loved the common people : the 
irony of his answer is prose : — u You should account me 
the more virtuous, that I have not been common in my 
love. I will, sir, flatter my sworn brother, the people, to 
earn a dearer estimation of them ; 'tis a condition they 
account gentle ; and since the wisdom of their choice is 
rather to have my hat than my heart, I will practise the 
insinuating nod, and be off to them most counterfeitly ; that 
is, sir, I will counterfeit the bewitchment of some popular 
man, and give it bountifully to the desirers. Therefore, 
beseech you, I may be consul." The bitterness of the 
soliloquy that follows is verse : 

"Better it is to die, better to starve, 
Than crave the hire which first we do deserve. 
Why in this wolvish gown should I stand here, 
To beg of Hob and Dick, that do appear, 
Their needless vouches ? Custom calls me to't : 
What custom wills, in all things should we do't, 
The dust on antique time would lie unswep't, 
And mountainous error be too highly heap'd 
For truth to overpeer. Rather than fool it so, 
Let the high office and the honour go 
To one that would do thus." 

The poet's power over language as an instrument is 
curiously apparent in this, that when he so purposes, he 
takes all heart out of the words, and makes them sound 



LITERATURE OF XVI. CENTURY. 



183 



as if tbey came merely from the lips. Observe how this 
occurs in the speeches of Goneril and Regan as contrasted 
with Cordelia's words : or the contrast between the utter 
hollowness of the king's request to Hamlet ; and the reality 
that there is in his mother's language. The king's is 
thus : 

" For your intent 
In going back to school in Wittenberg : 
It is most retrograde to our desire ; 
And we beseech you, bend you to remain 
Here, in the cheer and comfort of our age, 
Our chiefest courtier, cousin, and our son." 

The queen speaks to her son : 

"Let not thy mother lose her prayers, Hamlet, 
I pray thee, stay with us, go not to Wittenberg/' 

I propose in my next lecture to pass to the literature 
of the seventeenth century, and to connect with it some 
thoughts on the subject of Sunday reading. 



LECTURE VI. 



JTiteratarx of % ^zbtninnfy €zntm%, fxrxlb mdimtfal 
Suggestions on Hwtbag |ieafrhtg.* 

Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity — Progress of English literature — Sir 
Walter Raleigh's History of the World — Bacon's Essays — Mil- 
ton — Comus — Hymn on the Nativity — Suggestions as to Sunday 
reading — Sacred books — Forms of Christian faith — Evidences of 
religion — Butler's Analogy — Charles Lamb's Remarks on Stack- 
house — History of the Bible — Jeremy Taylor — Holy Living and 
Dying — Life of Christ — Pulpit-oratory — Southey's Book of the 
Church — Thomas Fuller — Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Sonnets — 
Izaak Walton's Lives — Pilgrim's Progress — The Old Man's Home — 
George Herbert — Henry Vaughan — Milton resumed — Paradise Lost 
— Criticism on it as a purely sacred poem — Shakspeare's mode of 
treating sacred subjects — Spenser — The Faery Queen — John Wes- 
ley — Keble's Christian Year — George Wither — Aubrey De Vere — 
Trench's sonnet. 

In following the progress of English literature, the 
difficulty of considering it according to what may be re- 
garded as the successive eras is greatly increased the far- 
ther we advance. The literature becomes more abundant 
in both departments, prose as well as verse, and the in- 
fluences that affect it, and are affected by it, are found to 
be more various and complicated. English prose-writing 
was hardly entitled to be looked on as literature until 
nearly two hundred years after English poetry had dis- 
closed many of its finest resources. It was not till about 
the year 1600 that Hooker, in the " Ecclesiastical Polity," 



* February 7, 1850. 

184 



LITERATURE OF XVII. CENTURY. 



185 



accomplished for English prose what Chaucer had done 
for English poetry before the year 1400. Accustomed, as 
we now are, to the combination of prose and poetry as 
making up a literature— language un metrical filling, too, 
a larger space than the metrical — we are apt to forget how 
long a period there was during which English literature 
may truly be said to have been without its prose. In the 
early literature, therefore, Chaucer may be thought of as 
the solitary rather than the central figure ; and thus of 
such a period a general view may be taken, which, at the 
same time, may show the individual genius that belonged 
to it. As we move forward, however, we find a more nu- 
merous company of poets, each having claim to attention, 
and, along with them, an increasing concourse of the 
prose-writers. You can readily perceive how it becomes 
more and more difficult to make any such grouping of the 
many actors in our literature, at the several periods, as may 
set them before you a well-arranged company rather than 
a confused throng ; to discover which was the great mind 
of the age, and yet not lose sight of others that circled 
round it. We trace the progress of the nation's litera- 
ture more laboriously, because more and varied elements 
entered into it, and because more minds were contributing 
to it. It becomes more necessary, in a brief and outline 
course of lectures like this, to allude, in a very cursory 
manner, to authors and their productions, well deserving 
extended consideration under more favourable circum- 
stances. 

As I have advanced toward that period of our litera- 
ture in which names illustrious, both in prose and in 
poetry, come crowding to our thoughts, I feel the necessity 
of asking you to bear in mind that this course of lectures 

Id* 



186 



LECTURE SIXTH. 



was designed to be merely of a suggestive character, to 
present a general view of the progress of English litera- 
ture, and its condition at successive periods, rather than a 
detailed examination of particular authors or books. 

It is possible to arrange in our minds the literature of 
our language into a series of successive eras, and this may 
be done with somewhat more precision than would at 
first be anticipated ; for it is not a mere arbitrary, chrono- 
logical distribution, corresponding with centuries or reigns, 
but an arrangement according to a certain set of influences 
affecting the English mind and character during a given 
length of time, more or less definite, to be succeeded by 
a new set of influences, producing a new phase of the 
nation's literature. Such a general view of English lite- 
rature is important, not only as saving one from a great 
deal of confusion of thought on the subject, but also as 
enabling us to see the great authors of different times, 
each in his appropriate grouping, and to carry out special 
courses of reading. The succession of our literary eras, 
with a little reflection and effort of memory, may be so 
familiarized as not to be forgotten. The earliest era — the 
age of Chaucer, as it may aptly be styled — the last half 
of the fourteenth century, was characterized by the va- 
rious influences which marked the mediaeval civilization ; 
the closing century of which civilization, from 1400 to 
1500, was, in consequence chiefly of internal commotion 
in England, a hundred years' sleep of the English mind, 
so far as literature was concerned. The first half of the 
sixteenth century has no more than a comparative inte- 
rest, as a period in which the English mind was making 
its transition from mediaeval to modern modes of thought 
and feeling, affected, too, in some degree, by the change 



LITERATURE OF XVII. CENTURY. 



1S7 



of the nation's ecclesiastical position. The latter part of 
the sixteenth century and the first part of the seventeenth 
century — in other words, the reigns of Queen Elizabeth 
and of James the First — form properly one era, al- 
though it is usually styled the Elizabethan era, in conse- 
quence, perhaps, of the greater glory of that reign in 
other matters than letters. The latter part of the seven- 
teenth century, after the Restoration, is the beginning of 
an era extending into the eighteenth century, with which, 
as a truer connection, I propose to consider it in the next 
lecture, directing my attention now to the early and 
middle portion of the seventeenth century. 

The prose literature of the early part of the seventeenth 
century received its most important addition in what may 
be said to be the second (in time) of the great English 
prose-works — Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World, 
the work with which he beguiled the years of his imprison- 
ment; his mind, within the prison-walls, travelling out into 
the remote regions of the ancient world's story, as actively 
as his body, in its years of freedom, had mingled with his 
fellow-men, and roamed over the distant spaces of the sea. 

To the same period of our prose literature belong the 
authorship and the philosophy of another man famous 
(and I had almost said infamous, too) in public life — 
Francis Bacon, Baron Verulam, Viscount St. Alban, and 
(would it had not been so) Lord High Chancellor of Eng- 
land. His philosophical works belong not so much to 
literature as to that high department of science which is 
meant to guide human inquiry, and mark out the bound- 
aries of human knowledge. His volume which does belong 
to literature in the more exact sense of the term, is the 
small one of " Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral j" and 



188 



LECTURE SIXTH. 



it does so, for a reason, which he has himself assigned, in 
a phrase which has become one of the familiar phrases of 
the language : when, after the cloud had fallen on his cha- 
racter, he collected these miscellanies — he said, "I do now 
publish my Essays, which of all my other works have been 
most current; for that, as it seems, they come home to 
men's business and bosoms." That the Essays do so ad- 
dress themselves thus universally and intimately to man- 
kind, is apparent from a mere glance at the list of titles; 
and that they contain a perpetual interest, is shown from 
the manner in which their condensed wisdom may be 
evolved for new applications — a condensation of wisdom 
which is united with much of the imaginative processes of 
thought, and is therefore doubly valuable as one of the 
books of discipline for well teaching. " Few books/' says 
Mr. Hallam, " are more quoted, and what is not always 
the case with such books, we may add, that few are more 
generally read. In this respect they lead the van of our 
prose literature : for no gentleman is ashamed of owning 
that he has not read the Elizabethan prose-writers; but it 
would be somewhat derogatory to a man of the slightest 
claim to polite letters were he unacquainted with the 
Essays of Bacon. It is, indeed, little worth while to read 
this or any other book for reputation's sake ; but very few 
in our language so well repay the pains or afford more 
nourishment to the thoughts. They might be judiciously 
introduced, with a small number more, into a sound method 
of education — one that should make wisdom, rather than 
mere knowledge its object, and might become a text-book 
of examination in our schools"* 



* Literature of Europe, vol. iii. chap. iv. \ xxxiv. p. 342. 



LITERATURE OF XVlI. CENTURY. 



In that which is essentially the literature of the seven- 
teenth century — prose as well as poetry — the name of Mil- 
ton is prominent, the beginning and the end of his career 
approaching respectively the opening and the close of the 
century. I speak of this, not simply as a matter of date, 
but on account of the relation of that career to the age 
in which it was cast. The first part of Milton's literary 
life is full of a beautiful reflection of the age that had gone 
before ; his genius is then glowing with tints of glory cast 
upon it by the Elizabethan poetry : the meridian of it is in 
close correspondence with the season of the power of the 
Parliament and the Protector, when Milton stood side by 
side with Cromwell ; and the latter period of it (which I 
propose to speak of in the next lecture) was that of sub- 
lime and solitary contrast with the times of Charles the 
Second. The first was the genial season of youth, studious, 
pure, and happy; the second was of mature manhood, 
strenuous in civil strife, and the dubious dynasty of the 
Protectorate ; the third was old age, darkened, disappointed, 
but indomitable. 

Of Milton's early poems, the most beautiful is the ex- 
quisite Masque of Comus, one of the last and loveliest 
radiations of the dramatic spirit, which seemed almost to 
live its life out in about half a century of English litera- 
ture, beginning in the times of Queen Elizabeth, and 
ending in those of Charles the First. It has been said by 
more than one judicious critic of another of Milton's 
early poems, "Lycidas," that the enjoyment of it is a 
good test of a real feeling for what is peculiarly called 
poetry. Of Comus, I think, it might be said, as truly as 
of any poem in the language, that it is admirably adapted 
to inspire a real feeling for poetry. It abounds with so 



190 



LECTURE SIXTH. 



much of true imagination, such attractiveness of fancy, 
such grace of language and of metre, and withal contains 
so much thought and wisdom wherewith to win a mind 
unused to the poetic processes, that were I asked what 
poem might best be chosen to awaken the imagination to 
a healthful activity, I would point to Milton's Comus, as 
better fitted than almost any other for the purpose. The 
poem, both in the conception and the execution, finely 
illustrates the power of the imagination, its moral al- 
chemy in 

"Turning the common dust 
Of servile opportunity to gold; 
Filling the soul with sentiments august, 
The beautiful, the brave, the holy, and the just."* 

For, observe on what a homely and familiar incident the 
poet has built up this beautiful superstructure of fancy 
and philosophy. When he was dwelling at his father's 
rural home, the Earl of Bridgewater was keeping his court 
not far off, at Ludlow Castle, and it happened that his 
two sons, and his daughter, the Lady Alice Egerton, were 
benighted and bewildered in Haywood Forest; where the 
brothers, seeking a homeward path, left the sister alone 
awhile in a tract of country inhabited by a boorish pea- 
santry. Such was all the story, simpler than the ballad 
of the Children in the Wood ; and yet it is transfigured 
into a poem of a thousand lines — -a moral drama showing 
the communion of natural and supernatural life, the mys- 
terious society of human beings, and the guardian and 
tempting spirits hovering round their paths : it teaches, 
with a poet's teaching, how the spiritual and intellectual 



* "Wordsworth's Desultory Stanzas. Works, p. 243. 



LITERATURE OF XVII. CENTURY 



191 



nature may be in peril from the charms of worldly plea- 
sures, and how the philosophic faith and the heaven- 
assisted virtue are seen at last to triumph. The guardian- 
ship of ministering angels — their encampment round the 
dwellings of the just— is finely announced in the opening 
lines, spoken by the attendant spirit alighting in the 
wood, where the human footsteps are astray : 

"Before the starry threshold of Jove's court 
My mansion is, where those immortal shapes 
Of bright aerial spirits live insphered, 
In regions mild of calm and serene air, 
Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot 
Which men call Earth, and with low-thoughted care, 
Confin'd and pester'd in this pinfold here, 
Strive to keep up a frail and feverish being, 
Unmindful of the crown that virtue gives 
After this mortal change to her true servants, 
Amongst the enthroned gods on sainted seats. 
Yet some there be that by due steps aspire 
To lay their just hands on that golden key 
That opes the palace of eternity ; 
To such my errand is; and but for such, 
I would not soil these pure ambrosial weeds 
With the rank vapours of this sin-worn mould." 

The genuine power of invention displayed in Comus is 
not disparaged; nay, the beauty of it is heightened, by 
the lights it reflects from the elder poets, of whom Milton 
was deeply studious, for he knew that poetry is not in- 
spiration alone, but art no less. There are passages 
which seem almost like echoes of the sweet modulations 
of Shakspeare's sentences — combinations of words which 
we should say were Shakspeare's, could we forget they are 
Milton's, as when the bewildered lady speaks : 

"A thousand phantasies 
Begin to throng into my memory, 



LECTURE SIXTH. 



Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire, 

And airy tongues, that syllable men's names 

On sands, and shores, and desert wildernesses. 

These thoughts may startle well, but not astound, 

The virtuous mind, that ever walks attended 

By a strong-siding champion, Conscience. 

Oh ! welcome pure-eyed Faith, white-handed Hope, 

Thou hovering angel, girt with golden wings, 

And thou, unblemished form of Chastity; 

I see ye visibly, and now believe 

That He, the Supreme Good, to whom all things ill 

Are but as slavish officers of vengeance, 

Would send a glist'ring guardian, if need were, 

To keep my life and honour unassailed." 

Again, there are passages which blend with a music of 
their own the melody of both Spenser and Shakespeare — 
the music of their words and of their thoughts — as when 
the brother speaks : 

" I do not think my sister so to seek 
Or so unprincipled in Virtue's book, 
And the sweet peace that goodness bosoms ever, 
As that the single want of light and noise 
(Not being in danger, as I trust she is not) 
Could stir the constant mood of her calm thoughts, 
And put them into misbecoming plight. 
Virtue could see to do what Virtue would, 
By her own radiant light, tho' sun and moon 
Were in the flat sea sunk. And Wisdom's self 
Oft seeks to sweet, retired solitude, 
Where, with her best nurse, Contemplation, 
She plumes her feathers, and lets grow her wings, 
That in the various bustle of resort 
Were all too ruffled, and sometimes impaired. 
He that has light within his own clear breast 
May sit in the centre, and enjoy bright day." 

When the lady is at last rescued from the wicked 
magic that encircled her, the good attendant spirit, his 



LITERATURE OF XYII. CENTURY. 



193 



guardianship achieved, speeds away like Ariel, set free to 
the elements, and leaves in poetry words of encourage- 
ment and promise to humanity : 

" Now my task is smoothly done, 
I can fly or I can run 
Quickly to the green earth's end 
Where the bow*d welkin slow doth bend, 
And from thence can soar as soon 
To the corners of the moon. 
Mortals, that would follow me, 
Love Virtue; she alone is free : 
She can teach ye how to climb 
Higher than the sphery chime, 
Or if Virtue feeble were, 
Heaven itself would stoop to her." 

One cannot part with this poem, radiant as it is with 
what is bright and pure and lofty in poetry and philoso- 
phy, without thinking how little that high-born woman, 
when her heart was throbbing in the loneliness of Hay- 
wood Forest — how little could she have thought that a 
young poet's words were to win for her more enduring 
honour than wealth or heraldry could bestow. 

The most distinct foreshadowing of Milton's great epic 
poem, and of his own independent genius, is an earlier 
poem — " The Hymn on the Nativity" — which gives the 
poet the fame of having composed almost in his youth the 
earliest of the great English odes, the like of which had 
not, I believe, been heard, since Pindar, two thousand 
years before, had struck the lyre for assembled Greece. 
It is a lyric that might have burst from that religious 
bard of paganism, could he have had prophetic vision of 
the Advent. It is a poem that revealed a new mastery 
of English versification, disciplined afterward to such 

17 



194 



LECTURE SIXTH. 



power in the blank verse of Paradise Lost. Nothing m 
the way of metre can be grander than some of the 
transitions from the gentle music of the quiet passages to 
the passionate parts, and their deep reverberating lines 
that seem to go echoing on, spiritually sounding, long; 
after they are heard no more. The universal peace at 
the time of the Nativity is told with the very music of 
peace : 

""No war or battle's sound 
Was heard the world around ; 

The idle spear and shield were high up hung : 
The hooked chariot stood 
Unstained with hostile blood; 

The trumpet spake not to the armed throng ; 
And kings sat still with awful eye, 
As if they surely knew their sovereign Lord was by. 

But peaceful was the night 
Wherein the Prince of Light 

His reign of peace upon the earth began : 
The winds, with wonder whist, 
Smoothly the waters kist, 

Whispering new joys to the mild ocean, 
Who now hath quite forgot to rave, 
While birds of calm sit brooding on the charmed wave." 

The stanzas that tell of hopes of a golden age again 
are followed by that solemn one : 

u But wisest Fate says no, 
This must not yet be so ; 

The Babe lies yet in smiling infancy, 
That on the bitter cross 
Must redeem our loss, 

So both himself and us to glorify ; 
Yet first to those ychained in sleep 

The wakeful trump of doom must thunder through the deep." 
The grandest portion of this poem is that which tells 



LITERATURE OF XTIT. CENTURY. 



1^ 



of the flight of the false deities of heathendom, the 
panic of the priests, the silencing of the oracles, and the 
cessation of the services of superstition, when the star 
was seen over the infant Saviour. The profusion of 
mysterious epithets and the dim imagery seem to blend 
the magic of the dark incantations of Shakspeare's witch- 
craft with the splendours of Greek mythology. Pagan- 
ism and superstition — Europe's, Asia's, Africa's — all, 
with all the host of their ministry, are vanishing like 
witches at the touch of music — a babe's cry heard from 
the manger at Bethlehem throughout the spiritual uni- 
verse : 

i The oracles are dumb ; 
No voice or hideous hum 

Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving. 
Apollo from his shrine 
Can no more divine, 

With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving. 
No nightly trance, or breathed spell, 
Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell. 

The lonely mountains o'er, 
And the resounding shore 

A voice of weeping heard and loud lament; 
From haunted spring and dale, 
Edged with poplar pale, 

The parting Genius is with sighing sent : 
With flower-inwoven tresses torn, 

The nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn. 

4fc % ^ ^ 

And sullen Moloch, fled, 
Hath left in shadows dread 

His burning idol all of blackest hue : 
In vain with cymbals' ring 
They call the grisly king, 

In dismal dance about the furnace blue : 



.96 



LECTURE SIXTH. 



The brutish gods of Nile as last 

Isis and Orus and the dog Anubis haste. 

Nor is Osiris seen, 

In Memphian grove or green, 

Trampling the unshower'd grass with lowings loud j 
Nor can he be at rest 
Within his saered chest ; 

Nought but profoundest hell can be his shroud : 
In vain with timbreFd anthems dark 
The sable-stoled sorcerers bear his worshipt ark. 

He feels from Juda's land 
The dreaded Infant's hand." 
% ^ 3}r ^ 

Of Milton's various prose-writings, and of his epic 
poems, it would hardly be possible to say much in a ge- 
neral lecture on the literature of the century. What I 
have to say respecting the Paradise Lost, I propose to 
put in this course in another connection. 

I have ventured to include, in the subject of this 
evening's lecture, some suggestions on Sunday reading ; 
and, in turning aside to this topic, let me first explain why 
I have connected it with this portion of my course. The 
literature of the seventeenth century includes that which 
is most generally regarded as the great sacred poem of our 
language — I mean, of course, the Paradise Lost ; and, 
again, it is the most illustrious age of English pulpit- 
oratory and of theological literature. Let me, in the 
next place, say, that I trust it will not be thought pre- 
sumptuous or impertinent in me to introduce, even some- 
what casually, into a course like this, the subject of Sun- 
day reading. I am truly solicitous, on the one side, not 



SUNDAY READING, 



197 



to put my hand unduly upon sacred subjects, which are 
appropriate to another profession of public teachers ; and, 
on the other, not to treat those sacred subjects, so far as 
I may have occasion to touch them, as ordinary topics of 
literature and taste. The literature which is associated 
with holy things must be approached with the reverential 
feeling with which the picture of a sacred subject should 
be looked on, remembering that there is due to it some- 
thing deeper than unloving, technical criticism of art. 

I have been attracted to this subject by the conviction 
that every Sunday has its unappropriated portions of 
time, and also that there is an abundant literature,^n 
English words, to be used appropriately to the day, and 
beneficially. The week-day opportunities for reading 
vary very much with the business and duties of our 
lives ) but our Sundays, with the rest they bring, put us 
all more on an equality. The most punctual attendance 
on public worship does not absorb the day ; and, the day's 
duties discharged, the evening can have no better employ- 
ment than that which is in-door and domestic. There 
are the contingencies, too, that compel the spending of 
the whole day at home ; and I believe that is a sore trial 
to those who have no resources for the employment of it. 
This is a great pity, considering how large those resources 
are. I do not propose to speak of the study of the Bible, 
because I am not willing to treat that as a literary occu- 
pation. It stands on higher ground, and ground of its 
own. 

With regard to modes of Christian faith and systems 
of church-government, it surely is becoming for every 
one, both man and woman, to have an intelligent know- 
ledge of their belief and membership It is right to 

N 



198 



LECTURE SIXTH. 



hold, with confidence and charity combined, to well-formed 
and precise principles, in all that we profess to give 
our spiritual allegiance to ; to understand our own position 
and to feel the strength of it, instead of that careless igno- 
rance, that latitudinarian indifference, which is seen and 
heard so much of — a mock liberalism, which I speak of as 
unreal, because, often when it is put to the test, it is found 
to cover either a hollow scepticism or a bitter intolerance, 
instead of genuine Christian charity. 

In the discipline of habits of reading, it is on many ac- 
counts important to draw a line of distinction between 
week-day reading and Sunday reading. Independently of 
the propriety of making the reading subservient to the uses 
of the day, such appropriation is desirable as a means of 
securing acquaintance with a large and very valuable por- 
tion of English literature — the department of its sacred 
literature being very extensive both in prose and poetry ; 
so extensive, indeed, that when this habit is well formed 
and cultivated, it will be found that the Sunday reading 
is more apt to encroach on the week-day reading than the 
reverse. 

The choice of books must be not only reverently suited 
to the day, but also large in their influences. It should 
be no narrow choice, for such would be unworthy of the 
manifold power of the day. It may associate with books 
which are formally and directly connected with sacred 
subjects, and others no less sacred in their influences, be- 
cause the sanctity is held more in reserve, acting, it 
may be, more deeply, because less avowedly. 

The sacred literature of our language may be described 
as containing books on the evidences of religion, sermons, 
devotional books, church history, biographies of saintly 



SUNDAY READING. 



199 



men and women, travels in the Holy Land, sacred allego- 
ries and other prose stories, and sacred poetry. The un- 
appropriated portions of the Sundays of a long life might 
find in the English books on such subjects varied and un- 
failing delight and spiritual health. 

Of one of the classes of books named, those on the evi- 
dences, it appears to me that injudicious use is not unfre- 
quently made. If a man is an unbeliever, these books 
may be good for him ; or if he has to deal with unbelievers, 
they may be of service to him : but to a believing Chris- 
tian, man or woman, many a well-intentioned work of this 
kind may be not only worthless, but injurious. A great 
work, such as Bishop Butler's, may indeed be invaluable 
both as a discipline of thought and as strengthening the 
intellectual conviction of the truth of revelation ; or such 
works as the Bridgewater Treatises may help to deepen 
the sense of the power, wisdom, and goodness of the 
Creator, as displayed in the universe. But there is a 
multitude of books which, I fear, are mischievous, for 
they tell the believing, faithful spirit of doubts which such 
a spirit never would have dreamed of — doubts engendered 
in the hard heart of unbelief, the miserable sophistries 
which skepticism has spun out. Why should the happy 
heart of belief even look at, much less pore over, such 
things, studying the refutation of fallacies never else 
heard of? What need of the antidote, if the poison would 
not come nigh you ? Why should believing Christian people 
think it worth while to waste their time and thoughts upon 
such things ? and above all, why the fresh and docile and 
believing spirit of youth, manly or womanly youth — the be- 
lieving children of believing parents — be trained in the 
knowledge of what Hume denied, and how Gibbon scoffed. 



200 



LECTURE SIXTH. 



and the ribald deism of Paine, for the sake of being 
taught how these things may be answered ? A little 
argumentative strength of belief may be gained, (per- 
haps,) but there is danger in the process that the power 
of affectionate, instinctive belief — a thousand-fold more 
precious — may be at the same time wasting and worn 
away. 

Charles Lamb's recollection from childhood of Stack- 
house's History of the Bible is full of warning on this 
subject. "I remember/' he says, "it consisted of Old 
Testament stories, orderly set down, with the objection 
appended to each story, and the solution of the objection 
regularly tacked to that. The objection was a summary 
of whatever difficulties had been opposed to the credibility 
of the history by the shrewdness of ancient or modern 
infidelity, drawn up with an almost complimentary excess 
of candour. The solution was brief, modest, and satis- 
factory. The bane and antidote were both before you. 
To doubts, so put, and so quashed, there seemed to be an 
end forever. The dragon lay dead for the foot of the 
veriest babe to trample on. But — like as was rather 
feared than realized from that slain monster in Spenser — 
from the womb of those crushed errors young dragonets 
would creep, exceeding the powers of so tender a St. 
George as myself to vanquish. The habit of expecting 
objections to a passage set me upon starting more ob- 
jections, for the glory of finding a solution of my own for 
them. I became staggered and perplexed, a skeptic in 
long coats. The pretty Bible stories which I had read, 
or had heard read in church, lost their purity and sin 
cerity of impression, and were turned into so many his- 
toric or chronologic theses to be defended against whatever 



SUNDAY READING. 



201 



impugners. I was not to disbelieve them, but — the next 
thing to that — I was to be quite sure that some one or 
other would or had disbelieved them. Next to making a 
child an infidel, is the letting him know that there are 
infidels at all."* 

Such an influence is not limited to childhood, but 
affects in like manner the spirit of belief at any age; and 
therefore it is safer and wiser to seek no knowledge of 
atheism, or deism, or skepticism, even in the refutation 
of them. 

This also should be borne in mind, that the evidences 
of religion, as discussed in the last century, when they 
were most rife, present Christianity in a defensive apo- 
logetic attitude, which is unworthy of it. The literary 
leaders of the times were the infidels Bolingbroke, and 
Hume, and Gibbon, and others earlier and later, the 
British infidelity which was followed by French infidelity. 
The insolence of unbelief had risen high, and the tone of 
the faithful was depressed; a style of defence prevailed 
which is out of place in a better age, where no infidel 
author has bold prominence in literature. That subdued 
mode of warfare with skepticism was oddly adverted to 
at the time by George the Third, (who, whatever his 
faults were, had the merit of being the first moral man that 
had sat on the British throne for more than a century :*}*) 
when Bishop Watson published his " Apology for the 



* Prose Works, vol. ii. p. 150. Essay on Witches and other Night 
Fears. 

In Lord Mahon's last volume of " The History of England," are 
two letters of George the Third to Bishop Hurd, on the death of one 
of his children, in 1783, which brightly illustrate the King's private and 
familiar character. Vol. vii. Appendix, p. 34. W. B. R. 



202 



LECTURE SIXTH. 



Bible," George the Third remarked, u Apology ! I did 
not know that the Bible needed an apology." 

Turning to the sacred literature of the seventeenth cen- 
tury, you find in it not only greater power of argumenta- 
tion, but also blended with it a feryid devotional spirit, 
the glow of genuine imagination, kindling narrative, 
reasoning, persuasion, philosophy, — all with one broad 
light, so that it is not the logical faculty which alone is 
appealed to, but the whole spiritual nature, the intellect, 
and the heart, the soul of man. This would be seen most 
clearly, perhaps, in the writings of the most imaginative, 
and eloquent of the great divines of that century — Bishop 
Jeremy Taylor : his Sermons, or his u Holy Living and 
Dying," the volume which may be spoken of as the most 
admirable manual of devotion in the language, or to that, 
the greatest probably of all his works, " The Life of our 
Saviour." Before those who are acquainted with the 
writings of Jeremy Taylor, I would not trust myself to 
speak of them, without a larger opportunity to do honour 
to them than time would now give me : to those who 
have yet in reserve the delight which such acquaintance 
gives, I could hardly so speak that the soberest truth 
should not sound like exaggeration. Every thing, almost, 
that is attractive in a merely literary point of view, is to 
be found there : a boundless variety of illustration gathered 
by a marvellous scholarship, the deepest and the gentlest 
i habits of feeling, an opulence of imagination and fancy 
like Shakspeare's or Spenser's, and a style that is the music 
worthy of such a spirit. A few years ago, the writings 
of Jeremy Taylor existed only in the early Folios, but 
now they are accessible in the more convenient forms of 
modern editions. The Holy Living and Dying, published 



SUNDAY READING. 



203 



separately, and in many editions, is a volume not to 
borrow, not to take out of a library, but to own, to hold 
it as a possession. 

Without attempting to speak of Barrow, or the other 
great English divines of a former age, 1 can only remark, 
that the literature is abundant in specimens of pulpit 
wisdom and oratory; and that in our own day, the 
strength and beauty of the olden time in this respect 
have come back again in some of the contemporary sermon 
literature. 

The history of the Christian church is another subject 
on which English literature gives us reading at once most 
agreeable and instructive. All the charms of Southey's 
prose may please you in his a Book of the Church or 
turning to the old church historian, Thomas Fuller, you 
may find in his History of the Church in Great Britain 
(one of the most remarkable works in the language) the 
varied powers of learning, sagacity, pathos, an overflowing 
wit, humour, and imagination, all animating the pages 
of a church history. The interest in this subject may be 
expanded and deepened by the studious reading of that 
poetic commentary on church history, the series of Words- 
worth's Ecclesiastical Sonnets, in which the poet-historian, 
with all a poet's truthfulness and feeling, has traced the 
course of Christian faith, from the trepidation of the 
Druids at the first tidings of the Gospel, onward through 
the various fortunes of the church, down to the consecra- 
tion of the first American Bishop. This series of poems 
is a beautiful and salutary study in connection with 
English history, for there is not an important event, or 
period, or influence, or saintly character in tne annals of 
the church in England, on which there is not shed the 



204 



LECTURE SIXTH. 



light of wise, imaginative, and feeling commentary. You 
have not forgotten, perhaps, the lines which in a former 
lecture I quoted, on the conversion of the Saxon king, 
and the incident that led to it. 

Much appropriate Sunday reading is supplied by the 
biography of the good men and women of early and late 
times. Amid the large variety of such records, one may 
be named— none more modest in origin, more unambitious 
in plan, but none more admirable as a memorial. I refer 
to Izaak Walton's Lives, of which the poet has said : 

" There are no colours in the fairest sky 
So fair as these. The feather, whence the pen 
Was shaped that traced the lives of these good men 
Dropped from an angel's wing."* 

Passing to the imaginative side of our literature, there 
is the sacred prose allegory, " The Pilgrim's Progress," 
a work second, I believe, only to Robinson Crusoe in the 
largeness of the audience it has gained in the world. 
Allegory has been beautifully revived in our own day in 
« The Old Man's Home/'f 

To any one who justly appreciates the moral uses of 
poetry as a spiritual ministry, it will be apparent that it 
should enter, well chosen, into our Sunday reading ; and 
there is no more marked characteristic of English litera- 
ture than the abundance and excellence of its sacred 
poetry. The seventeenth century contributed largely to it — 
beautifully so in the well-known poems of that saintly coun- 
try parson, George Herbert, and in the poetry, almost un- 



* Wordsworth, p. 306. Sonnet on Walton's Book of Lives, 
f The Old Man's Home, by the Reverend William Adams, M.A., 
Author of " The Shadow of the Cross." 



SUNDAY READING. 



205 



known, till its recent reproduction, fit to be associated 
with Herbert's — the poems of Henry Vaughan ; and in 
later times the English muse has not been regardless of 
its peculiar sacred functions. 

I must hasten, however, to the great sacred poems of the 
language, and recur first to Milton's epics. Of these poems, 
considered with reference to imaginative power, and all its 
accessories of wondrous verse, no language could express 
too strongly one's sense of their sublimity and beauty. 
Not only for poetic description of nature and regions super- 
natural, but also in deep human interest, the Paradise 
Lost stands among the world's great poems. But when 
we study it as a sacred poem, and ask ourselves carefully 
as to the religious impressions it gives, the character 
becomes questionable. This is chiefly in two respects : 
the character of Satan, and the bold handling of the 
Divine nature. The Miltonic Satan is undoubtedly one 
of the most stupendous and awful creations of poetry ; one 
of its grandest studies, but there is a heroic grandeur 
in it which wins, do what you will, a human sympathy. 
It is impossible to look on the Apostate Angel without 
awe, and somewhat of admiration, rather than abhorrence; 
sometimes perhaps with something of pity, as in that 
famous passage, where, having called his followers, myriads 
of the fallen angels thronged around their chief, and the 
peerage of Pandemonium stood in mute expectation of his 
voice. 

" Thrice he essay'd, and thrice, in spite of scorn, 
Tears, such as angels weep, burst forth." 

It was from such a representation of Satan as is given 
throughout the poem, that Arnold's deep religious feeling 
revolted, remarkiog, that " by giving him a human like- 

13 



206 



LECTURE SIXTH. 



ness, and representing him as a bad man, you necessarily 
get some images of what is good as well as of what is bad; 
for no living man is entirely evil. Even banditti have 
some generous qualities; whereas the representation of 
the devil should be purely and entirely evil, without a 
tinge of good, as that of God should be purely and entirely 
good, without a tinge of evil ; and you can no more get the 
one than the other from any thing human. With the 
heathen it was different ; their gods were themselves made 
up of good and of evil, and so might well be mixed up with 
human associations. The hoofs and the horns and the 
tail were all useful in this way, as giving you an image 
of something altogether disgusting. And so Mephisto- 
philes in Faust, and the other contemptible and hateful 
character of the Little Master, in Sin tram, are far more 
true than the Satan of the Paradise Lost."* 

With regard to Milton's hardihood in carrying his ima- 
gination into the mysteries of the being of the Most High, 
and the unreserved freedom with which the Father and 
the Saviour are set before us in this dramatic epic, I be- 
lieve that even the least sensitive reader must be conscious 
of an instinctive shrinking from many passages of the 
poem. It is in this, even more than in the character of the 
Arch-fiend, that the Paradise Lost — and the Paradise Re- 
gained also — may blunt the sense of adoration, and lower,, 
instead of raising, some of the emotions which sacred 
poetry ought to inspire. There are passages in the poems 
which, perhaps, it would be better never to read a second 
time. I should be loth to read them aloud here, because 
it would be difficult to divest them of a certain air of 



* Arnold's Life and Correspondence, in a note to Appendix C, p. 468. 



SUNDAY READING. 



207 



irreverence, which was not a purposed irreverence in the 
pure and lofty soul of Milton, but was an unconscious 
manifestation of the intellectual pride which was part of 
his character, and of the spiritual pride which belonged 
to his times. 

There is an impressive contrast between the spirit with 
which Milton and Shakspeare have treated the most sacred 
subjects. A reverential temper, less looked for in the dra- 
matic bard, marks every passage in which allusion is made 
to such subjects — a feeling of profound reverential reserve ; 
and as this may not have been generally observed, let me 
group some brief and characteristic passages together. 
There is the beautiful allusion to Christmas in Hamlet : 

" Some say, that ever 'gainst that season comes 
Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated, 
This bird of dawning singeth all night long : 
And then, they say,nor spirit dares stir abroad; 
The nights are wholesome ; then no planets strike, 
No fairy takes, no witch hath power to charm, 
So hallow'd and so gracious is the time." 

The mention, in Henry the Fourth, of the Holy Land— 

" those holy fields 
Over whose acres walk'd those blessed feet, 
Which, fourteen hundred years ago, were naiFd, 
For our advantage, on the bitter cross." 

Again, the single line in Winter's Tale, in which Poly- 

xenes refers to Judas and the betrayal 

"my name 

Be yok'd with his, that did betray the best V* 
The allusion to the scheme of Redemption and to the 
Lord's Prayer in Portia's plea for mercy 

" Though justice be thy plea, consider this — 
That in the course of justice none of us 
Should see salvation ; we do pray for mercy j 



208 



LECTURE SIXTH. 



And that same prayer doth teach us all to render 
The deeds of mercy " 

And most impressive, perhaps, of all — the deep feeling in 
the words of the saintly Isabella : 

" Alas ! alas ! 
Why, all the souls that were, were forfeit once ; 
And he, that might the Vantage best have took 
Found out the remedy : How would you be 
If he, which is the top of judgment, should 
But judge you as you are? think of that; 
And mercy then will breathe within your lips 
Like man new made." 

I can do little more now than allude to a contrast still 
more striking between Milton's want of reverential re- 
serve and Spenser's handling of religious truth, moving 
gently and with awe, as if with an ever-abiding sense 
that the ground he was treading on was holy ground. 
It was characteristic of Milton and of his times, when 
religion was freely talked about and rudely handled, to 
make his great epic avowedly a sacred poem — to put it in 
direct connection, if possible, with scriptural subjects. 
The genius of Spenser could not have ventured on what 
would have seemed to his gentle and reverential nature 
a profane handling of hallowed things and thereupon he 
employed, not the direct, but the veiled mode of sacred 
instruction. That veil interposed by his imagination was 
a gorgeous one, so interwoven with the richness of pagan - 
poetry, " barbaric gold," and of romantic Christian 
fancy, that the dazzled eye often fails to look through it 
to the scriptural truth that is steadily beaming there, 
oi-reat injustice is done to Spenser, when, bewildered 
with the mazes of his inexhaustible creations, or by 
the brightness of his exuberant fancy, we see in the 



SUNDAY READING. 



209 



Faery Queen nothing more than a wondrous fairy tale, a 
wild romance, or a gorgeous pageant of chivalry. Be- 
yond all this, far within it, is an inner life; and that is 
breathed into it from the Bible. It is the great sacred 
poem of English literature. u I dare be known to think," 
said Milton, addressing the Parliament of England, " our 
sage and serious poet, Spenser, a better teacher than 
Scotus or Aquinas."* When John Wesley gave direc- 
tions for the clerical studies of his Methodist disciples, 
he recommended them to combine with the study of 
the Hebrew Bible and the Greek Testament, the read- 
ing of the Faery Queen; and, in our own day, Mr. 
Keble, the poet of " The Christian Year," has de- 
scribed the Faery Queen as " a continual deliberate 
endeavour to enlist the restless intellect and chivalrous 
feeling of an inquiring and romantic age on the side of 
goodness and faith, of purity and justice. "f 

Spenser himself, expounding his allegory to his friend 
Sir Walter Raleigh, said, "The general end of all the 
book is to fashion a gentleman, or noble person, in virtu- 
ous and gentle discipline."! Christian philosopher, as 
well as poet, Spenser's deep conviction, manifest through- 
out the poem, was that the only discipline wherewith to 
tame the rebellious heart of man is that morality which, 
in one of his own sweet phrases, bears 

" The lineaments of gospel-books." \ 

* Milton's ProseWorks, 8vo.p.l08. On Liberty of Unlicensed Printing. 

f Quarterly Review, vol. xxxii. p. 225, June, 1825. In an article on 
Sacred Poetry, attributed to Mr. Keble. 

J Spenser's Letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, prefixed to Poetical Works, 
vol. i. p. 5. 

§ An Elegie on Friend's Passion for his Astrophell. Spenser's 
Poetical Works, vol. v. p. 261. 

18* 



210 LECTURE SIXTH. 

The student of sacred poetry must not be startled at 
meeting with thoughts, or rather images, drawn from other 
sources than Holy Scripture. The imagination of a great 
poet can make the heathen world tributary to the Chris- 
tian ; you meet in the Faery Queen the exploded mytho- 
logy of paganism, and Scripture story, so shadowed forth 
together that the sanctity of the latter is no wise sullied 
by the contact. When one of Spenser's heroes visits the 
realms of the lost spirits, he beholds Tantalus with the 
hunger and the thirst of ages on him, and the dread of 
centuries to come; and not far off another wretch, plunged 
in the infernal waters, washing his blood-stained hands — 
washing eternally, hopelessly, the deep damnation of Pon- 
tius Pilate ; images, one caught from pagan fable, the 
other from Holy Writ; images, too, of unending woe, the 
Bufferings hereafter of a wicked life. 

In like manner, when Milton recounts the hosts of 
Pandemonium, there is that transcendent effort of the 
imagination by which he grasps the mythology of classi- 
cal antiquity and thrusts it down into hell, ranging the 
gods of Greece — Olympic Jove himself — with the inferior 
powers of the apostate angels, Satan's followers and ser- 
vants. It is a mistake, I think, to limit our notice of 
sacred poetry to that which has an express and direct 
connection with biblical topics, for it is a high prerogative 
of the Christian imagination to rescue from the realms of 
error, fictions and superstitions, and make them safely 
subservient to the cause of revealed truth. It is this pro- 
cess, admirably conceived and executed, which entitles 
Sou they' s Curse of Kehama and Thalaba to be ranked 
with the great sacred poems of the language. 

Thus a large range may be demanded for sacred poetry; 



SUNDAY READING. 



211 



and yet in another aspect all narrowed to the relation in 
which it stands to revealed teaching and Holy Writ. 
That remarkable poet of the seventeenth century, George 
Wither — whose writings, unfortunately, are so little acces- 
sible — seems to have been disposed to look more to the 
resources of his own thoughts than either to the pro- 
fession of preaching or the increase of books : he says it 
was not his religion 

¥ Up and down the land to seek, 
To find those well-breath'd lecturers, that can 
Preach thrice a Sabbath, and six times a week, 
Yet be as fresh as when they first began." 

And speaking of books, he writes : 

"For many books I care not, and my store 
Might now suffice me, though I had no more 
Than God's two Testaments, and then withal 
That mighty volume which the world we call; 
For these well look'd on, well in mind preserved, 
The present Age's passages observed ; 
My private actions seriously o'erviewed, 
My thoughts recalled, and what of them ensued, 
Are books, which better far instruct me can, 
Than all the other paper-works of man; 
And some of these I may be reading, too, 
Where'er I come, or whatsoe'er I do."* 

A poet, a happy-hearted poet, like Wither, whose 
imagination could make cheerful employment within his 
prison walls, might speak thus; but for our common 
minds the poet's help is needed : it will often help us the 
better to know and feel the three volumes with which the 
old poet was content with — the two Testaments and the 
mighty volume called the world; and doubtless not only 



* Wither, as quoted in " Church Poetry," p. 72. 



212 



LECTURE SIXTH, 



the sacred poetry, but all high and serious poetry, may 
be traced to some germ of revealed truth. The highest- 
human poetry is in affinity with the divine poetry ; and, 
however they may differ in degree, I do not believe that 
they are separated by characteristic difference in kind. 
What are the Latin hymns of the mediaeval church, such 
as that famous one on the Day of Judgment, which clung 
to the dying lips of Walter Scott, murmuring snatches of 
it when his mind had on all else faded away, — what were 
those poems but human versions of inspiration ?* What 
are the hymns of Ken and of Keble but echoes from the 
lyric song of the Bible ? Wordsworth's sublime com- 
munings with nature do but amplify and reiterate the 
Psalmist's declaration of the glory of God as manifested 
in the universe ; and when the poet shows that 

" Heaven lies about us in our infancy,"f 
and teaches the holiness and beauty of the innocence of 
childhood— a theme for sophisticated man to reflect on — 
what is this but an expression of the truth that is con- 
tained in the Saviour's words, " of such is the kingdom 
of heaven ?" 

Aubrey De Vere's thoughtful lines on Sorrow, are but 
an echo of the divine teaching : 

* "We very often heard distinctly the cadence of the Dies Tree; and 
I think the very last stanza that we could make out was the still 
greater favourite : 

Stabat mater dolorosa, 
Juxta crucem lachrymosa, 
Dum pendebat filius." 

Loekharfs Scott, vol. x. p. 214. As this volume is passing through 
the press, we have received the news of Mr. Lockhartfs death at Ab- 
botsford, in December, 1854. W. B. R. 

f Wordsworth's Ode on Intimations of Immortality. Works, p. 388. 



SUNDAY READING. 



213 



H Count each affliction, whether light or grave 
God's messenger sent down to thee. Do thou 
With courtesy receive him : rise and bow, 
And ere his shadow pass thy threshold, crave 
Permission first his heavenly feet to lave. 
Then lay before him all thou hast. Allow 
No cloud of passion to usurp thy brow, 
Or mar thy hospitality ; no wave 
Of mortal tumult to obliterate 
The soul's marmoreal calmness. Grief should be, 
Like joy, majestic, equable, sedate, 
Confirming, cleansing, raising, making free ; 
Strong to consume small troubles ; to commend 
Great thoughts, grave thoughts, thoughts lasting to the end."* 

Again : another living poet does but teach how to apply 
a well-known text, and feel its truth the more 7 when he 
says : 

"We live not in our moments or our years — 
The Present we fling from us as the rind 
Of some sweet Future, which we after find 
Bitter to taste, or bind that in with fears, 
And water it beforehand with our tears — 
Vain tears for that which never may arrive ; 
Meanwhile the joy whereby we ought to live 
Neglected or unheeded disappears. 
Wiser it were to welcome and make ours 
Whate'er of good, though small, the Present brings — 
Kind greetings, sunshine, song of birds, and flowers, 
With a child's pure delight in little things ; 
And of the griefs unborn to rest secure, 
Knowing that mercy ever will endure."f 

This is a poet's teaching of the cheerfulness of Chris- 
tian faith and the love of Christian content and happiness ; 

* Aubrey De Vere's Waldenses, with other poems quoted in an 
Essay on De Vere's Poems, in Taylor's Xotes from Books, p. 215. 

j- Sonnet by the Rev. R. C. Trench, quoted in Church Poetry, or 
Christian Thoughts in Old and Modern Verse, p. 62. 
O 



214 LECTURE SITXH. 

and this is but the rebuke of unchristian sullenness, and 
the praise of Christian thankfulness : 

" Some murmur, when their sky is clear 

And wholly bright to view, 
If one small speck of dark appear 

In their great heaven of blue. 
And some with thankful love are filPd 

If but one streak of light, 
One ray of God's good mercy gild 

The darkness of their night. 
In palaces are hearts that ask, 

In discontent and pride, 
Why life is such a dreary task, 

And all good things denied? 
And hearts in poorest huts admire, 

How love has in their aid 
(Love that not ever seems to tire) 

Such rich provision made."* 

Thus do the Poets minister in the Temple. 



* Trench's Poems, p. 116. 



LECTUKE VII. 



iTiterate* of i\t ^tbtxdzmi\ attir ©^tatttlj €zvdxtxm-* 

Milton's old age — Donne's Sermons — No great school of poetry with- 
out love of nature—Blank in this respect between Paradise Lost and 
Thomson's Seasons — Court of Charles the Second — Samson Ago- 
nistes — Milton's Sonnets — Clarendon's History of the Rebellion — Pil- 
grim's Progress — Dryden's Odes — Absalom and Achitophel — Rhym- 
ing tragedies — Age of Queen Anne — British statesmen — Essayists — 
Tatler — Spectator — Sir Roger I)e Coverley — Pope — Lord Boling- 
broke — English infidels — Johnson's Dictionary — Gray — Collins — 
Cowper — Goldsmith — The Vicar of Wakefield — Cowpcr — Elizabeth 
Browning. 

In proceeding to the literature of the close of the 
seventeenth century, we approach a period which is 
marked by great change. Heretofore in the succession 
of literary eras there had been a continuity of influence, 
which had not only served to give new strength and 
develope new resources, but to preserve the power of the 
antecedent literature unimpaired. The present was never 
unnaturally or disloyally divorced from the past. The 
author in one generation found discipline for his genius 
in reverent and affectionate intercourse with great minds 
of other days. Such was their dutiful spirit of discipline, 
strengthening but not surrendering their own native 
power — the discipline so much wiser and so much more 
richly rewarded in the might it gains, than the self-suffi- 
cient discipline, which, trusting to the pride of origi- 



* Thursday, February 14, 1850 

215 



216 



LECTURE SEVENTH. 



nality or the influences of the day, disclaims the ministry 
of time-honoured wisdom. Milton was studious of Spen- 
ser, and Spenser was grateful and reverent of Chaucer ; 
and thus, as age after age gave birth to the great poets, 
they were bound " each to each in natural piety. " But 
when we come to those who followed Milton, the golden 
chain is broken. The next generation of the poets aban- 
doned the hereditary allegiance which had heretofore been 
cherished so dutifully, transmitted so faithfully. 

It was at this time that the earlier literature began to 
fall into neglect, displaced with all its grandeur and 
varied power of truth and beauty, displaced for more than 
a century by an inferior literature, inferior and im purer, 
so that for more than a hundred years, many of the finest 
influences on the English mind were almost wholly with- 
drawn. Indeed, it is only within the present century 
that the restoration of those influences has been accom- 
plished. Here we see within our own day, the revival of 
early English literature, bringing from dust and oblivion 
the old books to light and life again, to do their perpetual 
work upon the earth — the work that was denied to them 
by an age that was unworthy of them. No longer since 
than ten years or less, there was no good edition of the 
complete works of Chaucer. Ten years ago, the sermons 
of the greatest preacher of the times of James the First, 
Donne, the Dean of St. Paul's, were almost inaccessible, 
entirely so, I might say, to scholars in this country, in 
the first and very rare folio edition. Even the writings 
of Jeremy Taylor were a rare treasure, until about twenty- 
five years ago, Bishop Heber did the good service of giv- 
ing ready access to them in a modern edition ; and not to 
speak of the miscellaneous literature, over which the dust 



LITERATURE OF XVII. AND XVIII. CENTURIES. 217 



lay so thicks all the early dramatists, save Shaks- 
peare, lay in comparative neglect till their recent resto- 
ration. 

I refer to this neglect as both a symptom and a cause 
of the decline of English literature, which began at the 
close of the seventeenth century, and lasted for about a 
century. Genius of a higher order would never have di- 
vorced itself from such an influence. It would have 
strengthened itself by loyalty to it. 

Besides their disloyalty to the great poets who had 
gone before, the poets of the new generation were guilty 
of another neglect, equally characteristic, and more fatal 
perhaps to high poetic aspirations ; I refer to the neglect 
of the poetic vision of nature, external nature, the sights 
and sounds of this material world, the glory of which, 
proclaimed in divine inspiration, is ever associated with 
" the consecration and the poet's dream. " Who can 
question, without questioning the Creator's wisdom and 
goodness, that the things of earth and sky have their 
ministry on man's spiritual nature? We may not be able 
to measure or define it, but it is a perpetual and universal 
influence, and it must be for good. Most of all is it 
recognised by the poet, prepared as he is 

" By his intense conceptions to receive, 
Deeply the lesson deep of love which he 
Whom nature, by whatever means, has taught 
To feel intensely, cannot but receive."* 

No great poet, perhaps I may say no great writer, is 
without the deep sense of the beauty and glory of the 



* The Excursion, book i. 397. 



218 



LECTURE SEVENTH. 



universe, the earth that is trod on, the heavens that are 
gazed at. It is an element of the poetry of the Bible. 
The classical poetry of antiquity shows it: it abounds, in 
vernal exuberance, in Chaucer; you meet with it per- 
petually in Spenser, and Shakspeare, and Milton, and in 
the prose of Bacon and Taylor. But when we come to 
the next generation, particularly of poets, the spiritual 
communion with nature was at an end. They had not 
vision of sunlight or starlight, but were busy within doors 
with things of lamp-light or candle-light. They took not 
heed of mountain, or seaside, or the open field, and nature's 
music there, but city, " the town," street and house were 
all in all to them : 

" The soft blue sky did never melt 
Into their hearts."* 

If it can be shown, as it undoubtedly can, that thought- 
ful, genial communion with Nature is an accompaniment 
of all poetry of the highest order, in all ages, surely we 
may infer that a literary era which is deficient in this 
element is the era of a lower literature. Now, it has 
been ascertained, by careful examination, that, with two 
or three unimportant exceptions, " the poetry of the pe- 
riod intervening between the publication of the Paradise 
Lost and Thomson's Seasons (a period of about sixty 
years) does not contain a single new image of external 
nature ; and scarcely presents a familiar one from which 
it can be inferred that the eye of the poet had been 
steadily fixed upon his object — much less that his feelings 
had urged him to work upon it in the spirit of genuine 



* Peter Bell, part i. p. 163. 



LITERATURE OF XVII. AND XVIII. CENTURIES. 



219 



imagination."* Let us now rapidly consider some of the 
causes, or, at least, accompaniments, of the degeneracy 
of English literature, and particularly of its poetry, which 
began in the latter part of the seventeenth century. 
The civil war was over, and the fierce bloodshedding which 
marked England's civil wars, and which should be an 
awful warning to all who are sprung from that stock, the 
strong usurpation of Cromwell had passed away — each 
period with its evils."}* The Restoration came, and what 
were the evils that came along with it ? In the Middle 
Ages, the miseries that were the common train of war in 
Europe were pestilence and famine ; but, after the do- 
mestic war in England in the seventeenth century — an ec- 
clesiastical civil war — came debauchery, licentiousness, riot, 
and blasphemy. The rigour of Puritanism once removed, 
there came quickly in its stead a lawlessness in which the 
exultation of triumph mingled, and men took a party 
pride in immorality. All high moods of feeling were 
ridiculed : honour was a jest, and so were justice and 
dignity, and piety and domestic virtue ; and conjugal faith 



* Appendix to Wordsworth's Works. Essay, p. 490. 

f " The usurpation of Cromwell" is a phrase about which, in our 
day, there may be some question, not, however, here to be discussed. 
There is American authority for it, which I cite, as curiously illus- 
trative of the cavalier tendencies of " the Father of his country." In 
1792, Washington sent to Sir Isaac Heard a memorandum as to his 
family, which begins thus : 

" In the year 1657, or thereabouts, and during the usurpation ot 
Oliver Cromwell, John and Lawrence Washington emigrated from the 
North of England and settled at Bridge's Creek, on the Potomac River, 
in the county of Westmoreland. But from whom they descended, the 
subscriber is possessed of no document to ascertain." — Sparks* Wash- 
ington, vol. xii. p. 547. W. B. R. 



220 



LECTURE SEVENTH. 



was tLe greatest jest of all. The civil war had also de- 
moralized the nation by breaking up the habits of domes- 
tic life : households were destroyed, and their proprietors 
found a shelter in taverns; and when the necessity for 
such disordered life had passed away, the low habits were 
left behind. 

To a nation, thus diseased, there was perpetually passing 
the moral poison that issued from the avenues of the pa- 
lace. From the earliest era of the history of the island, 
no portion had been so loathsome as the quarter of a cen- 
tury during which Charles Stuart, the younger, was on 
the throne. When the early life of Queen Elizabeth was 
visited with afflictions, she came forth from her trials with 
a spirit chastened and invigorated for a mighty reign. 
But upon Charles Stuart the lesson of adversity was 
wasted. The bloody fate of his father might well have 
thrown a solemn memory of the past over all his after 
life. When the Restoration brought him once more to 
the royal home of his childhood, he seems to have 
mounted the throne with a determination to make up the 
arrears of interrupted pleasure by a career of unrestrained 
debauchery, the like of which had not been seen in Eng- 
land before. The ancient palace was reeking with the 
filthy atmosphere of the tavern or viler haunts of iniquity. 
Moral opinion was scoffed at, and national honour be- 
trayed. The monarch of that island which had more 
than once swayed the destinies of Europe, sold himself 
to a monarch as profligate, but prouder, for Charles be- 
came the mean-spirited pensioner of Louis the Fourteenth. 
Vice was in riotous possession of the high places of the 
land, and the throne was the seat of the scoffer. Look- 
ing from the throne thus occupied, and begirt with profli- 



LITERATURE OF XVII. AND XV III. CENTURIES. 221 



gates and wits, Shaftesbury, and Buckingham, and 
Bochester, the old age of Milton is seen with heightened 
sublimity. There was hanging over the palace, the capi- 
tal, the land, a dark atmosphere of sensuality, lurid, at 
times, with such cruelties as mingle with heartless frivo- 
lity; and Milton had passed into that seclusion of which 
it h s been grandly said : 

"Milton, 

Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart : 

Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea — 

Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free.""* 

His varied career drew to a solemn ending. He who in 
youth and early manhood had given the freshness of 
poetic fervour a homage to the best of England's nobility, 
the Egertons and Spensers ; he who roamed over the Alps 
and Italy, visiting Galileo, and communing with the friend 
of Tasso, and Italian scholars ; he who had stood by the 
side of Cromwell and Fairfax and Vane, in their years of 
power, — was now a lone man in the land, all his strife for 
the commonwealth wasted, and left to what the world then 
little heeded, but which has made his name immortal. It 
is of this period of Milton's life, that Mr. Hallani has elo- 
quently spoken in a passage which I desire to quote, 
especially for the sake of an educational suggestion which 
accompanies it : 

" Then the remembrance of early reading came over 
his dark and lonely path, like the moon emerging from 
the clouds. Then it was that the muse was truly his ; not 
only as she poured her creative inspiration into his mind, 



* Wordsworth, p. 213. Am. Ed. 
19* 



222 LECTURE SEVENTH. 

but as the daughter of memory, coming with fragments of 
ancient melodies, the voice of Euripides, and Homer, and 
Tasso; sounds that he had loved in youth, and treasured 
up for the solace of his age. They who, though not endur- 
ing the calamity of Milton, have known what it is, when 
afar from books, in solitude or in travelling, or in the 
intervals of worldly care, to feed on poetical recollections, 
to murmur over the beautiful lines whose cadence has long 
delighted their ear, to recall the sentiments and images 
which retain by association the charm that early years 
once gave them— they will feel the inestimable value of 
committing to the memory, in the prime of its power, 
what it will easily receive and indelibly retain. I know 
not, indeed, whether an education that deals much with 
poetry, such as is still usual in England, has any more 
solid argument among many in its favour, than that it 
lays the foundation of intellectual pleasures at the other 
extreme of life."* 

Such is the opinion of one of the most judicious minds 
of the day — -a mind trained in the most exact and laborious 
historic research ; and I quote it because I apprehend that 
among us the tendency of late years has been to neglect 
this excellent discipline of the memory, which enabled our 



* Literature of Europe, vol. 3. p. 425. The late Mr. Gallatin (at the 
time I refer to more than eighty years old) once told me that one of the 
purest pleasures and consolations of his advanced years was the recol- 
lection of his earliest studies, his Latin and Greek which he had learned 
at school, and passages of the ancient poets, that, without conscious 
effort, were constantly presenting themselves to his mind. The memo- 
ries of intermediate politics, and finance, and business, active and un- 
remitted, were fading away, but what he learned by rote when a boy 
name back fresh to cheer him. W. B. R. 



jITER ATURE OP XVII. AND XVIII. CENTURIES. 223 



elders to keep that possession in their minds of long 
passages of poetry, which astonishes their feebler de- 
scendants. 

To return to Milton : he whose delight it had once been 
to roam through woods, and over the green fields, was 
now chained by blindness to the sunny porch of a subur- 
ban dwelling. He whose heart's pulse was a love of inde- 
pendence, was now a helpless dependent for every motion, 
for all communion with books ; every step of him, who 
had walked through all the ways of life so firmly, was at 
the mercy of another. His spirit was darkened, too, with 
disappointment in his countrymen, and with bitter memo- 
ries of domestic discords. As the Comus was a beautiful 
reflection of happy youth, the Samson Agonistes shadows 
forth the gloomy grandeur of the poet's old age. In some 
passages there is the breaking out of a bitter agony; but a 
stern magnanimity pervades the poem — a high-souled pa- 
thos befitting the sorrows of a vanquished, captive giant. 
With our thoughts of the hero of the tragedy mingle 
thoughts of the poet himself, for what was John Milton 
in the degenerate days of Charles the Second, but a blind 
Samson in the citadel of the Philistines ? In the words 
the hero speaks, we seem to hear the voice of Milton's own 
spirit, subdued to a gentle melancholy : 

" I feel my genial spirits droop, 

* * * * 

My race of glory run, and race of shame ,* 
And I shall shortly be with them that rest." 

Before passing from this subject, let me briefly notice the 
service which Milton rendered to English poetry in that 
short series of short poems — his English Sonnets, which 



224 



LECTURE SEVENTH. 



Doctor Johnson was disposed to dismiss with contempt.* 
Heretofore that form of verse had been appropriated almost 
exclusively to the expression of love or some tender emo- 
tion; but Milton showed that it could be made a high 
heroic utterance, as in that one on the massacre of the 
Piedinontese, which is a solemn cry to Heaven for ven- 
geance that seems to echo over the Alps. This service in 
disclosing the hidden powers of the sonnet has been ac- 
knowledged by Wordsworth : 

"When a damp 
Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand 
The Thing became a trumpet, whence he blew 
Soul-animating strains — alas, too few!"f 

And Landor has finely put this page of literary history 
into three lines, (so much can a few words do in a masters 
hand !) when speaking of Milton, he says, 

" Few his words, but strong, 
And sounding through all ages and all climes ; 
He caught the sonnet from the dainty hand 
Of Love, who cried to lose it ; and he gave the notes 
To Glory." 

Within the same twelve months in which Milton died, 
occurred the death of the Earl of Clarendon, who, like 
Milton in this, that in a season of political adversity he 
sought employment in letters, gave to English prose what 
may be considered the first of the great English his- 
tories — that wondrous portrait gallery, the " History of the 
Rebellion." 

To the English prose of the same period belongs a very 



* " They deserve not any particular criticism, for of the best it can 
only be said they are not bad. n Life of Milton, p. 234. W. B. R. 
f Wordsworth's Miscellaneous Sonnets, p. 187. 



LITERATURE OF XVII. AND XVIII. CENTURIES. 225 



different work — associated also with the calamities of 
authors — the "Pilgrim's Progress/' the great sacred prose 
fiction of our literature, which justifies the title given to 
John Bunyan by D' Israeli, who calls him "the Spenser 
of the people." It is one of the few books which, trans- 
lated into the various languages of Europe, has gained an 
audience as large as Christendom. In his own country, 
he caught the ear of the people by using the people's own 
speech — genuine, homely, hearty English — at the time 
when the language was becoming vitiated, his simple 
rhetoric being as he describes it in rude verse : 

"Thine only way, 
Before them all, is to say out thy say 
In thine own native language, which no man 
Now useth, nor with ease dissemble can."* 

But the author who is most truly to be looked on as 
the representative of the latter part of the seventeenth 
century is Dry den, the laureate of the court of Charles 
the Second. That degenerate era is reflected both in the 
character of Dryden's writings and in their quick-earned 
popularity. Content to write for his own age alone, 
rather than for all after-time, a brief popularity has 
been followed by the utter neglect — a wise neglect — 
of a very large portion of his voluminous productions. 
His genius did not raise itself above his times, but 
dwelling there, a habitation steaming with a thousand 
vices, his garland and singing-robes were polluted by the 
contagion. 

For wellnigh fifty years Dryden was contemporary with 
Milton, living in the same city much of that time, and 

* Quoted in Southey's Life of Bunyan, prefixed to his edition of 
the Pilgrim's Progress, p. 29. 



226 



LECTURE SEVENTH. 



in occasional intercourse; and I cannot but picture to 
myself how different might have been the career of the 
young poet, how much purer and nobler the issues of his 
imagination, how much happier and more genial his life, 
and how far more honoured his memory, if, instead of 
setting himself in sympathy with the dominant influences 
and fashions of the day, and serving them, he had sought 
communion with the solemn solitude of Milton ! How 
noble a spectacle it would have been for after ages to con- 
template the older bard, blind, poor, neglected, and with 
a grieved but unconquered spirit, the younger poet seated 
at the old man's feet, making himself a partner in his 
fallen fortunes, honouring and cherishing him, and at the 
same time fortifying his own heart, and enriching his own 
imagination ! It would have been a filial piety, such as 
Milton gladly would have rendered to Spenser — homage 
such as Spenser would have paid to Chaucer. 

But the soul of Dryden was not cast in heroic mould, 
nor was it susceptible of that purity, and innocence, and 
ardour of affection which is often associated with heroism. 
Dazzled by the prize of a speedy popularity, and losing 
sight of the poet's high spiritual ministry of "allaying 
the perturbations of the mind, and setting the affections 
in right tune," he turned to the base office of pampering 
the vices of an adulterate generation. Even when his 
youthful enthusiasm was fired with the ambition of com- 
posing an epic poem on King Arthur and the Knights of 
the Round Table, (the same subject which had attracted 
Milton's young imagination,) the high design was swept 
from his thoughts by the corruption of the times— sacri- 
ficed to the ignominious thraldom he was held in by 
patrons who, exacting unworthy service, would not suffer 



LITERATURE OF XVII. AND XVIII. CENTURIES. 227 



him to put on the incorruption of a great poet's glory.* 
In Waiter Scott's indignant lines : 

" Drydeu, in immortal strain, 
Had raised the table-round again, 
But that a ribald king and court, 
Bade him toil on, to make them sport; 
Demanded for their niggard pay, 
Fit for their souls, a looser lay, 
Licentious satires, song and play ; 
The world defrauded of the high design, 
Profaned the Grod-given strength, and marred the lofty line/'f 

When we look at Dry den's vigorous command of lan- 
guage, in prose and verse, the poetic energy in those de- 
partments in which his genius moved most freely, we may 
well conceive that a higher region of authorship was in his 
reach, had he united with intellectual cultivation that 
moral discipline, which no endowment can dispense with, 
without grievous peril to its powers. In the following 
passage from his OEdipus, there is a certain tone of reflec- 
tion and imagery which is not without resemblance to the 
thought and language of Shakspeare : 

* Dryden's intended epic was not a mere vision of youth, but, ac- 
cording to his best biographers, was in his mind at different periods 
of life, though always deferred by the low influences around him. At 
one time, King Arthur was the theme ; at another, it was Edward 
the Black Prince subduing Spain, (Ifitford's Life, Aldine Poets, p. 78.) 
Milton's young vision appears in his Epistle to Mansus : 
" mihi si mea sors talem concedat amicum 

Phoebasos decorasse viros qui tarn bene norit, 

Siquando indigenas revocabo in carmina reges, 

Arturumque etiam sub terris bella moventem ! 

Aut dicam invictae sociali faedere mensae 

Magnanimos heroas j et modo spiritus adsit 

Frangam Saxonicas Britonum sub Marte phalanges ! M W. B. R. 

f Introduction to Marmion., Canto i. Poetical Works, vol. vii. p. 36. 



LECTURE SEVENTH. 



" Ha ! again that scream of woe ! 
Thrice have I heard, thrice since the morning dawn'd, 
It hollow'd loud, as if my guardian spirit 
Called from some vaulted mansion, ' (Edipm !* 
Or is it but the work of melancholy ? 
When the sun sets, shadows that showed at noon 
But small, appear most long and terrible ; 
So when we think fate hovers o'er our heads, 
Owls, ravens, crickets, seem the watch of death ; 
Nature's worst vermin scare her godlike sons. 
Echoes, the very leavings of a voice, 
Grow babbling ghosts, and call us to our graves s 
Each mole-hill thought swells to a huge Olympus, 
While we, fantastic dreamers, heave and puff, 
And sweat with an imagination's weight j 
As if, like Atlas, with these mortal shoulders 
We could sustain the burden of the world." 

That one fine stanza in the Ode for St. Cecelia's Day, 
shows what lyric grandeur Dryden might have at- 
tained to : 

" What passion cannot Music raise and quell ? 
When Jubal struck the chorded shell, 
His listening brethren stood around, 
And wondering, on their faces fell, 
To worship that celestial sound ; 
Less than a god they thought there could not dwell, 
Within the hollow of that shell, 
That spoke so sweetly and so well." 

In no respect did Dryden more rashly and fatally aban- 
don the authority of his great predecessors, than in his 
attempt to introduce rhymed tragedies. The introduction 
of rhyme into the dramatic poetry was a false substitute 
for that exquisite blank-verse which, in the hand of a 
great master, is at once so imaginative and natural, that it 
sounds like an ordinary speech idealized— the dialect of 
daily life in its highest perfection. But the rhymed dra- 



LITERATURE OF XVII. AND XVIII. CENTURIES. 229 



matic dialect stood in no such near and truthful relation to 
the realities of life, as I may show, perhaps, by a reference 
to a variety of language occurring in Shakspeare. It will 
be remembered that the chief and best reputation of Dry- 
den lies in this, that he enlarged the domain of English 
poetry by the production of the most nervous satire in 
verse that English literature had yet known. It has been 
said by Milton, in one of his prose works, that "a satire, as 
it was born out of a tragedy, so ought to resemble his 
parentage, to strike high, and adventure dangerously, at 
the most eminent vices among the greatest persons. "* 
Dryden's satire had this merit. It struck at Buckingham. 
It was also employed on the unworthy versifiers and 
scribblers, for authorship had degenerated to a low craft, 
with all its worst enviousness and meanness, in dismal 
contrast with that frank and hearty intercourse which dis- 
tinguished the companionship of authors in an earlier 
generation, living in genial fellowship, and weaving even 
their inspirations together in partnership that was a 
brotherhood. 

A literary life like Dry den's closed with an old age 
without dignity and without happiness — the remnant of 
life, worn out in his Egyptian bondage, embittered both 
by neglect and the memory of talents misspent in the 
service of a sensual and sordid king and corrupt cour- 
tiers. There was nothing of the grandeur of Milton's lonely 
old age ; but, in the period of Dryden's desolation, we 
may trace the chastening of adversity in some strains of a 
higher mood, as in those admirable lines in which he tells 
of his effort at Christian forbearance when provoked to 



* Milton's Apology for Smectymnuus, J vi. Prose Works, p. 88, 8 vo. 
P 20 



230 



LECTURE SEVENTH. 



resent and retort. This passage is worthy of all praise, 

especially when we remember his power of satire, his 

unimpaired poetic invective, now controlled by a higher 

principle : 

" If joys hereafter must be purchased here 
With loss of all that mortals hold so dear, 
Then welcome infamy and public shame, 
And, last, a long farewell to worldly fame ! 
'Tis said with ease ; but, oh, how hardly tried 
By haughty souls to human honour tied ! 
Oh, sharp, convulsive pangs of agonizing pride ! 
Down then, thou rebel, never more to rise ! 
And what thou didst, and dost so dearly prize, 
That fame, that darling fame, make that thy sacrifice. 
'Tis nothing thou hast given ; then add thy tears 
For a long race of unrelenting years, — 
'Tis nothing yet, yet all thou hast to give : 
Then add those maybe years thou hast to live 
Yet nothing still : then, poor and naked, come, 
Thy Father will receive his unthrift, home, 
And thy blest Saviour's blood discharge the mighty sin."* 

The death of Dry den took place in the year 1700, and 
we pass into the literature of the eighteenth century, the 
first part of which is not unfrequently styled the Augustan 
age of Queen Anne. It was Augustan in that men of 
letters were basking in the sunshine of aristocratic pa- 
tronage, and a courtly refinement succeeded to that gross- 
ness of manners and of speech which had disgraced society 
in the years just previous. Writers were no longer plunging 
in the mire of that obscenity which defiled the times of 
Charles the Second ; but they were often walking in the 
dry places of an infidel philosophy. The religious agita- 
tion of the middle of the previous century had sunk 



* The Hind and Panther, part iii. v. 1575. 



LITERATURE OF XVII. AND XVIII. CENTURIES. 231 



down from the high-wrought power of fanaticism, first, 
into indecent profanity, and then, by degrees, into a more 
decorous, but cold, self-complacent skepticism. Enthusi- 
asm of all kinds had burned out, and there was a low tone 
of thought and feeling in church and state — in the people, 
and, of consequence, in literature. There was no great 
British statesman — I mean no genuine, magnanimous 
statesman — from the time of Strafford, and Clarendon, and 
Falkland, and the great republican statesmen of the 
seventeenth century, down to a century later, when the 
first William Pitt, a the great Commoner," breathed a 
spirit of magnanimity once more into British politics. 

The prose literature developed, in the reign of Queen 
Anne, a new agency of social improvement in the pe- 
riodical literature, destined to acquire such unbounded 
influence in later times in the newspaper press and the 
leading Reviews. There is much to show that a more 
correct and refined tone of society was brought about by 
the papers which, under the title of " The Tatler," from 
the pen of Steele, began that series which became more 
famous in the " Spectator," and in connection with Ad- 
dison. " It was said of Socrates," remarked Steele, 
"that he brought philosophy down from heaven to inhabit 
among men. I shall be ambitious to have it said of me 
that I have brought philosophy out of closets and libra- 
ries, schools, and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, 
at tea-tables, and in coffee-houses." Not many years ago, 
it was very generally the custom, I remember, for every 
young person, male and female, to go through a course 
of reading of the papers of the Spectator. This hag 
fallen quite into disuse now-a-days, and I do not know 
that it is much to be regretted. The Spectator contains, 



232 



LECTURE SEVENTH. 



undoubtedly, much sensible and sound morality ; but it 
is not a very high order of Christian ethics. It contains 
much judicious criticism, but certainly not comparable to 
the deeper philosophy of criticism which has entered into 
English literature in the present century.* Those papers 
will always have a semi-historical interest, as picturing the 
habits and manners of the times — a moral value, as a 
kindly, good-natured censorship of those manners. In 
one respect, the Spectator stands unrivalled to this day : 
I allude to the exquisite humour in those numbers in 
which Sir Roger de Coverley figures. If any one desire 
to form a just notion of what is meant by that very inde- 

* Let me, in other and better language than my own, say a word 
for our classic. " It seems to me/' says the greatest of living writers 
of fiction and the manliest satirist of our times, " that when Addison 
looks from the world, whose weaknesses he describes so benevolently, 
up to the heaven which shines over us all, I can hardly fancy a hu- 
man intellect thrilling with a purer love and adoration than Joseph 
Addison's. It seems to me his words of sacred poetry shine like 
stars. They shine out of a great, deep calm. When he turns to hea- 
ven, a sabbath comes over that man's mind, and his face lights up 
from it with a glory of thanks and prayer. His sense of religion stirs 
his whole being. In the fields, in the town ; looking at the birds in 
the trees — at the children in the streets ; in the morning or in the 
moonlight ; over his books in his own room ,* in a happy party at a 
country merry-making or a town assembly, good-will and peace to 
God's creatures, and love and awe of Him who made them, fill his 
.pure heart and shine from his kind face. If Swift's life was the 
most wretched, I think Addison's was one of the most enviable. 
A life prosperous and beautiful, a calm death, an immense fame and 
affection afterward for his happy and spotless name." — Thackeray's 
Lectures on the English Humorists. I may venture to express the hope 
that the habit of reading the Spectator will not fall into disuse. I 
know no finer line in any English poet than one of Addison's, when 
the Moon repeats her wondrous tale 

" Nightly to the listening earth." W. B. R. 



LITERATURE OF XVII. AND XVIII. CENTURIES. 



233 



finable quality called " humour/' he cannot more agree- 
ably inform himself than by selecting the Sir Roger de 
Coverley papers, and reading them in series. 

While Addison was giving to English prose that refine- 
ment which was verging, perhaps, to somewhat of feeble- 
ness, the strong hand of Swift — a man with a stronger 
intellect and a rougher heart — was scattering that vigorous 
prose which touched the other extreme of coarseness; and 
Bolingbroke was giving, in his statelier and more elegant 
diction, that prose the study of which has by some of 
England's best orators been pronounced an orator's best 
training. 

The chief representative name in the literature of the 
times of Queen Anne is that of Pope. His rank as a poet 
has been a subject of much dispute; but it may now, I 
think, be considered as the settled judgment of the most 
judicious critics, ardent admirers, too, of Pope's poetry, 
that his place is not with Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, 
and Milton, the poets of the first order, but with Dryden, 
in a second rank. Shakspeare alone excepted, perhaps 
no English poet has furnished a greater amount of single 
lines for apt and happy quotation, on account either of 
their force or beauty. In the famous satire on the 
Duchess of Marlborough occurs this passage : 

" Strange ! by the means defeated of the ends— 
By spirit robVd of power — by warmth, of friends— 
By wealth, of followers ! without one distress, 
Sick of herself through very selfishness! 
Atossa, curs'd with every granted prayer, 
Childless with all her children, wants an heir • 
To heirs unknown descends the unguarded store, 
Or wanders, heaven-directed, to the poor" 

This passage furnishes two most characteristic lines ; the 

20* 



234 



LECTURE SEVENTH. 



first one of great force — a truth from the dark side of hu- 
manity, the wasting malady of selfishness : 

" Sick of herself through very selfishness." 

The other, a beautiful expression of the sense of a good 
Providence : 

" Or wanders, heaven-directed, to the poor." 

There is another description of lines in Pope, as favourite 
in the way of quotation as any : I mean those which ex- 
press in smooth verse some truism, or commonplace senti- 
ment, or something the very tameness of which makes it 
untrue. What line has been quoted so often ? — you may 
see it even on tombstones — 

"An honest man's the noblest work of God." 

Does anybody think so ? Is honesty so rare ? Has it so 
much of heroism in it, or so much of saintliness, that it is 
God's noblest work ? Surely, the poet must have uttered 
it in contempt of his fellow-men — must have meant it in 
sarcasm.* 

And here we may see what disqualified Pope from being 
the great moral poet he aspired to be — from being a great 
poet of the first rank. Whatever was his power of imagi- 
nation, of fancy, his command of language, or flow of 
verse, his genius had not that spiritual healthfulness 
which is a characteristic of our greatest English poets. 
There is, running through all the writings of Pope, a large 
vein of misanthropy. It was his habit to proclaim con- 
tempt of the world, antipathy to his fellow-beings, ex- 
cept a few choice friends, whom he clung to most faith 
fully. It is not with such morbid feeling that a poet can 



* From this criticism I venture to note an earnest dissent. 

W. B. R. 



LITERATURE OF XVII. AND XVIII. CENTURIES. 235 

either study or expound human nature. His ministry is 
to inspire his fellow-beings with high and happy emotions, 
to foster a just sense of the dignity of human nature, to 
make man lowly wise, to cheer him amid his frailties, not 
to depre'ss him, to animate his heart with faith, and hope, 
and love, not to chill and harden it with discontent and 
hatred. Instead of aggravating all that is dark and for- 
lorn in man's mingled nature, it belongs to the poet, of all 
others, to show that while the son of earth is lying on the 
earth, lonely, benighted, his head pillowed on a stone, 
thoughts of a better life, the soul's celestial aspirations, 
are ascending and descending over him, like angels in the 
patriarch's dream. For such, the poet's truest ministry, 
Pope's temperament was unhappily constituted. In a 
letter to Bishop Atterbury — a serious letter on a serious 
occasion — addressed to that prelate on the eve of his exile, 
he asks, "What is every year of a wise man's life but a 
censure or critic on the past ? Those whose date is the 
shortest, live long enough to laugh at one-half of it : the 
boy despises the infant, the man the boy, the philosopher 
both, and the Christian all."* What could have been that 
notion of philosophy, what that notion of Christianity, 
which could make one of its attributes contempt, that in- 
firmity of the morbid mind, in the eye of divine wisdom a 
vice ! How different, too, such contempt of the past 
periods of one's life, from that deeper wisdom which incul- 
cates the moral continuity of our being, showing how im- 
portant it is for the growth of our spiritual nature that 
we should so dwell in each partition of our earthly time, 
that we may move on from one to the other with happy 



* Letter, May 17th, 1723. Roscoe's Pope, vol. ix. p. 241. 



1 



236 



LECTURE SEVENTH. 



memories of the past — with happy consciousness of its 

abiding influences ! 

" The child is father of the man ; 
And I could wish my days to be 
Bound each to each by natural piety."* 

It is a characteristic view of human life which Pope 

gives in such a passage as this : 

" Behold the child, by nature's kindly law, 
Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw ; 
Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight, 
A little louder, but as empty quite ; 
Scarfs, garters, gold, amuse his riper age, 
And beads and prayer-books are the toys of age : 
Pleased with this bauble still, as that before, 
Till tired he sleeps, and life's poor play is o'er." 

The " rattle," a u straw," " scarfs, garters, gold, beads, 
and prayer-books," equally toys and baubles, and ending 
alike in weariness, and then death or sleep. What a 
picture of life ! what a picture for a poet, whose duty is 
to dignify and elevate, to draw, of the life of man, who 
with all his infirmities, is an immortal, gifted with a soul, 
precious in the sight of his Creator, and not unworthy 
the awful ransom of the Redeemer's blood ! A great 
moral poet does not so teach. " Life's poor play !" Such 
is this didactic poet's deliberate doctrine. The image is 
Shakspeare's, but with a most significant difference : 

" Out, out, brief candle ! 
Life's but a walking shadow ,* a poor player, 
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, 

* There may be noted a coincidence between these familiar lines of 
Wordsworth and those of Milton : 

" The childhood shows the man, 
As morning shows the day." 

Paradise Begained, B. 4, v. 220. W. B. R. 



LITERATURE OF XVII. AND XVIII. CENTURIES. 23'i 



And then is heard no more : it is a tale 
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 
Signifying nothing." 

But mark the dramatic truth, when you see what voice 
speaks thus ; it is the utterance of the agony of a blood- 
stained conscience, whose guilt has so wasted out all its 
humanity, that it would fain lose all belief in life's 
realities. 

The sophisticated state of society in which Pope lived, 
and the morbid excess of his critical powers, show them- 
selves in his treatment of womanly character : it is full 
of querulousness, and sarcasm, perverse in sentiment and 
in morals. He exhorts a female friend 

H Not to quit the free innocence of life, 
For the dull glory of a virtuous wife." 

What a line for a poet to utter ! and what a contrast to 
those bright images of womanly heroism and beauty 
which the older poets delighted to picture in marriage I 
When Pope begins a healthier strain in that sweet 
couplet — 

" blest with temper, whose unclouded ray 
Can make to-morrow happy as to-day" — 

see what straightway it declines to, — such a tribute to 
womanly character as this, that a sister can be unenvious 
of a sister's beauty, and that a mother can hear un- 
aggrieved the love that is given to a daughter, and that a 
wife's merit is to win a way for her own will by a crafty 
self-control and a refined dissimulation : 

* She who can love a sister's charms, or hear 
Sighs for a daughter with unwounded ear ; 
She who ne'er answers till a husband cools, 
Or if she rules him, never shows she rules ; 



238 



LECTURE SEVENTH. 



Charms by accepting, by submitting sways, 
Yet has her humour most when she obeys." 

When the household emotion of filial piety got the 

better of the worldly want of feeling and the artifices 

of society, Pope's heart spoke in the lines alluding to his 

mother, beautiful for their truth of feeling : 

" Oh, friend, may each domestic bliss be thine ! 
Be no unpleasing melancholy mine ! 
Me let the tender office long engage 
To rock the cradle of declining age ; 
With lenient arts extend a mother's breath — 
Make languor smile, and smooth the bed of death, 
Explore the thought, explain the asking eye, 
And keep at least one parent from the sky." 

There was an influence over the mind of Pope, which 
must be alluded to as belonging to the literary history of 
the times : I refer to the overshadowing and malignant 
influence of the friendship of Lord Bolingbroke — a man 
whose brilliant talents do not redeem his memory from 
the reproach of corrupt statesmanship, and the more en- 
during agency of evil which he exercised as one of the 
leading deistical writers of the eighteenth century. That 
influence often intercepted the light of revelation. You 
may see not unfrequently playing on the surface of Pope's 
fancy the shadows that were cast by the restless leaves 
of the poison-tree of a godless philosophy.* 

* It may be hazardous, even as a matter of criticism, to express an 
opinion favourable to Bolingbroke, yet no one can read a page of his 
matchless English—any page taken at random from that greatest of 
political apologies, the letter to Wyndham — without enthusiastic 
admiration of his art of style, and without admitting it to be the per- 
fection of written eloquence. Such is the opinion of Lord Mahon in 
his excellent delineation of his character. (History of England, vol. ii. 
p, 27.) Another writer of our day says justly : " The best test to use, 



LITERATURE OF XVIL AND XVIII. CENTURIES. 239 



No company of writers has sunk into such general and 
merited oblivion as the British infidels, who were the 
precursors of the French skeptics in the last century. 
We look back with somewhat of wonder and dismay at 
the extent of the influence they exerted for a considerable 
time over the minds of their countrymen in an advanced 
stage of intellectual refinement. It had its sway over the 
most cultivated classes of society, the court, the men of 
letters, but happily had less effect on what is less heard 
of — the simple piety which never died out in the quiet 
parish churches of the land, and was cherished at many a 
lowly hearth. In the prouder spheres of society, and in 
literature, deism and all the motley mockery of unbelief 
had an almost unresisted power. I know of no sadder 
sentence in English literature, than that in which Bishop 
Butler, in the preface to his great defence of revealed 
religion, remarks, "It is come, I know not how, to be 
taken for granted by many persons, that Christianity is 



before we adopt any opinion or assertion of Bolingbroke's, is to con- 
sider whether in writing it he was treating of Sir Robert Walpole or 
revealed religion. On other occasions he may be followed with 
advantage, as he always may be read with pleasure." Creasy* 8 Battles 
of the World, vol. ii. p. 158. Surely He must always be regarded reve- 
rentially, as a master of English rhetoric, whom Burke studied, whose 
lost speeches the younger Pitt mourned as the greatest loss to modern 
letters, and of whom a writer like Chesterfield said, " Till I read Bo- 
lingbroke, I confess I did not know all the extent and power of the 
English language." Bad as were his religious opinions, they do not 
seem to have degenerated to the low atheistic level which some of his 
contemporaries reached. "When I took my last farewell of him," 
writes Lord Chesterfield, " he returned his last farewell with tenderness, 
and said, ' God, who placed me here, will do what he pleases with me 
hereafter; and he knows best what to do. May he bless youT" 
W. B. R. 



240 



LECTURE SEVENTH. 



not so much as a subject of inquiry; but that it is % w, 
at length, discovered to be fictitious. And accordingly 
they treat it as if, in the present age, this were an agreed 
point among all people of discernment; and nothing 
remained but to set it up as a principal subject of mirth 
and ridicule, as it were by way of reprisals, for its having 
so long interrupted the pleasures of the world."* 

This was said in 1736, and to such a state of things no 
man contributed more than Henry St. John, Viscount 
Bolingbroke, he whom Pope, in the poem which professed 
to be his philosophical poem — " The Essay on Man" — has 
apostrophized as his " genius," " master of the poet and 
the song," his " guide, philosopher, and friend." 

The middle of the eighteenth century presents English 
literature, and especially its poetry, reduced to its lowest 
estate. Those who followed Pope, to imitate him with- 
out his powers, rendered the poetry of that period tame, 
trite, mechanical, and monotonous in versification. "What 
the middle of the last century has to be proud of is, Dr. 
Johnson's colossal work, the first great Dictionary of our 
language. 

The last half of the century is an era of the revival of 
English poetry — a revival which began indeed somewhat 
earlier with Thomson, but which was carried on by Gray, 
and by Collins, and Goldsmith, and Cowper, and another 
whose peasant hand was a fit one to bring poetry back to 
nature again — Robert Burns, who led the muse into the 
open fields once more, to look on the flowers, and most of 
all, that one which " glinted forth" to delight his age, as it 
used to do Chaucer's, four hundred years before. We feel 



* Advertisement to the first edition to Butler's Analogy, p. 48. 



LITERATURE OF XVII. AND XVIII. CENTURIES. 241 



that we are getting out of a close atmosphere and an artificial 
light into the open air and sunshine again,when, passing from 
the previous versifiers, we come to Burns, and see that it was 

"Mid 'lonely heights and hows' 
He paid to Nature, tuneful vows ; 
Or wiped his honourable brows 

Bedewed with toil, 
While reapers strove, or busy ploughs 

Upturned the soil." 

Connected with one of the names I have mentioned as 
of the revivers of a truer spirit of English poetry, there is 
an incident of much interest, the memory of which was 
recovered a few years ago, and which serves to mark the 
period of a favourite poem. The incident has been intro- 
duced by Lord Mahon, in his admirable History of Eng- 
land, and I cannot do better than use his words. On the 
night of the 13th of September, 1759, the night before the 
battle on the Plains of Abraham was to give to Wolfe the 
fame of the Conqueror of Canada, the English general 
passed along the St. Lawrence, with a portion of his army 
in boats ; the historian proceeds : " Swiftly, but silently, 
did the boats fall down with the tide, unobserved by the 
enemy's sentinels at their posts along the shore. Of 
the soldiers on board, how eagerly must every heart have 
throbbed at the coming conflict ! how intently must every 
eye have contemplated the dark outline, as it lay pencilled 
upon the midnight sky, and as every moment it grew 
closer and clearer, of the hostile heights ! Not a word was 
spoken — not a sound heard beyond the rippling of the 
stream. Wolfe alone — thus tradition has told Ub— re- 
peated in a low voice to the other officers in his boat those 
beautiful stanzas with which a country church-yard in 
spired the muse of Gray. One noble line 

21 



242 LECTURE SEVENTH. 

' The paths of glory lead but to the grave'— ■ 

must have seemed at such a moment fraught with mourn- 
ful meaning. At the close of the recitation, Wolfe added, 
'Now, gentlemen, I would rather be the author of that 
poem than take Quebec !' 

Of Gray, and Goldsmith, and Cowper this is also to be 
remembered — that they have enriched the literature with 
prose as attractive as their poetry. It would be hard to 
say in which respect Goldsmith is most agreeably and 
affectionately remembered — as the author of " The Deserted 
Village/' or of " The Vicar of Wakefield" Besides, the 
letters of Gray, our epistolary literature received its largest 
contributions in these two collections, equally characteristic 
of the writers, and very different in their tone — the letters 
of Horace Walpole, covering more than half a century, 
filled with political and private gossip, and sparkling with 
the wit of an acute man of the world, in the midst of the 
world's busiest society — and the letters of Cowper, partly 
by virtue of his exquisite English, and partly by the 
purity and earnestness of his character, and his gentle 
humour, giving a charm that is indescribable to the simple 
incidents and occupations of his secluded life, and that 
places his letters with the most agreeable reading in Eng- 
lish literature. The historical literature of the century 
I reserve for a connection in which I propose to speak of 
it hereafter. 

In the revival of English poetry which I have been 

* History of England, vol. iv. p. 163. One of Mr. Reed's modest 
literary labours was an American edition, with notes, of Lord Mahon's 
early volumes. The notes were illustrative, and very judicious. Had 
his life been spared, he would probably have completed the edition. 

W. B. R. 



LITERATURE OF XVII. AND XVIII. CENTURIES. 



243 



speaking of, an auxiliary influence was exerted by the resto- 
ration of the early minstrelsy in Percy's Reliques. That 
popular poetry was made familiar to reading men, and its 
simple power helped English poetry to recover not only 
its natural graces, but the best freedom and variety of its 
music. Cowper caught the free movement of verse in his 
well-known comic ballad of John Gilpin, and not less in 
the tragic one — that simple and noble Dirge, on the re- 
markable casualty of the sinking of the Royal George 
at her moorings : 

"Toll for the brave! 

The brave that are no more ! 
All sunk beneath the wave, 
Fast by their native shore ! 

Eight hundred of the brave, 

Whose courage well was tried, 
Had made the vessel keel, 

And laid her on her side. 

A land-breeze shook the shrouds, 

And she was overset : 
Down went the Royal George, 

With all her crew complete. 

Toll for the brave ! 

Brave Kempenfelt is gone; 
His last sea-fight is fought, 

His work of glory done. 

It was not in the battle; 

No tempest gave the shock ; 
She sprang no fatal leak ; 

She ran upon no rock. 

His sword was in the sheath ; 

His fingers held the pen, 
When Kempenfelt went down 

With twice four hundred men, 



LECTURE SEVENTH. 



Weigh the vessel up, 

Once dreaded by our foes ! 
And mingle with our cup # 

The tear that England owes. 

Her timbers yet are sound, 

And she may float again, 
Full charged with England's thunder, 

And plough the distant main. 
But Kempenfelt is gone, 

His victories are o'er; 
And he, and his eight hundred, 

Shall plough the wave no more." 

No poet of the last century did as much as Cowper for 
the restoration of the admirable music of the then neglect- 
ed blank verse. When Cowper died, in the year 1800, 
exactly one hundred years after the death of Dryden, 
English poetry was again in possession of all its varied 
endowment of verse. In a course of lectures which I 
delivered here some ten years ago, I concluded a lecture 
on Cowper by quoting a poem then new and little known 
—the stanzas entitled " Cowper' s Grave/ 9 by Elizabeth 
Browning, then known by her maiden name of Barrett. 
While I have avoided, as far as possible, repetitions from 
my former courses, I am tempted to repeat the stanzas 
now, because on the former occasion they made, as I have 
been informed, an impression that was not lost. The 
merit of the poem is not only in the happy allusions to 
Cowper' s character and career of checkered cheerfulness 
and gloom, but also in its depth of passion and imagination. 

COWPER'S GRAVE. 
It is a place where poets crowned 

May feel the heart's decaying — 
It is a place where happy saints 

May weep amid their praying — 



LITERATURE OF XVII. AND XVIIL CENTURIES. 246 



Yet let the grief and humbleness, 
As low as silence, languish ; 

Earth surely now may give her calm 
To whom she gave her anguish. 

poets ! from a maniac's tongue 

Was poured the deathless singing ! 
Christians ! at your cross of hope 

A hopeless hand was clinging ! 
men ! this man in brotherhood, 

Your weary paths beguiling, 
Groaned inly while he taught you peace, 

And died while ye were smiling ! 

And now, what time ye all may read 

Through dimming tears his story — 
How discord on the music fell, 

And darkness on the glory — 
And how, when, one by one, sweet sounds 

And wandering lights departed, 
He wore no less a loving face, 

Because so broken-hearted — 

He shall be strong to sanctify 

The poet's high vocation, 
And bow the meekest Christian down 

In meeker adoration : 
Nor ever shall he be in praise 

By wise or good forsaken : 
Named softly, as the household name 

Of one whom* God hath taken. 

With ^uiet sadness, and no gloom, 

I learn to think upon him ; 
With meekness that is gratefulness, 

To God whose heaven hath won him — 
Who suffered once the madness-cloud, 

To his own love to blind him ; 
But gently led the blind along 

Where breath and bird could find him : 
Q 21* 



LECTURE SEVENTH. 



And wrought within his shattered brain 

Such quick poetic senses, 
As hills have language for, and stara 

Harmonious influences ! 
The pulse of dew upon the grass 

Kept his within its number ; 
And silent shadows from the trees 

Refreshed him like a slumber. 

Wild timid hares were drawn from woods 

To share his home caresses, 
Uplooking to his human eyes 

With sylvan tendernesses : 
The very world, by God's constraint, 

From falsehood's ways removing, 
Its women and its men became, 

Beside him, true and loving ! — 

But while, in blindness he remained 

Unconscious of the guiding, 
And things provided came without 

The sweet sense of providing, 
He testified this solemn truth, 

Though frenzy-desolated — 
Nor man nor nature satisfy , 

Whom only God created ! 

Like a sick child that knoweth not 

His mother while she blesses, 
And drops upon his burning brow 

The coolness of her kisses; 
That turns his fever'd eyes around — 

" My mother ! where's my mother 
As if such tender words and looks 

Could come from any other ! — 

The fever gone, with leaps of heart 
He sees her bending o'er him ; 

Her face all pale from watchful love, 
The unweary love she bore him I 



LITERATURE OF XVII. AND XVIII. CENTURIES. 247 



Thus woke the poet from the dream 

His life's long fever gave him, 
Beneath those deep pathetic Eyes, 

Which closed in death to save him. 

Thus ! oh, not thus ! no type of earth 

Could image that awaking, 
Wherein he scarcely heard the chaunt 

Of seraphs round him breaking — 
Or felt the new immortal throb 

Of soul from body parted ; 
But felt these eyes alone, and knew 

"My Saviour ! not deserted !" 

Deserted ! who hath dreamt that when 

The cross in darkness rested 
Upon the Victim's hidden face, 

No love was manifested ? 
What frantic hands outstretched have e'er 

The atoning drops averted — 
What tears have washed them from the soul — » 

That one should be deserted? 

Deserted ! God could separate 

Erom his own essence rather r 
And Adam's sins have swept between 

The righteous Son and Father; 
Yea ! once Immanuel's orphaned cry 

His universe hath shaken — 
It went up single, echoless, 

" My God, I am forsaken !" 

It went up from the Holy's lips 

Amid his lost creation, 
That of the lost, no son should use 

Those words of desolation ; 
That, earth's worst frenzies, marring hope, 

Should mar not hope's fruition ; 
And I, on Cowper's grave, should «ee 

His rapture, in a vision ! 



LECTURE VIII. * 



Literature of our own times — Influence of political and social rela- 
tions — The historic relations of literature — The French Revolution, 
and its effects — Infidelity — Thirty years' Peace — Scientific progress 
coincident with letters — History — Its altered tone — Arnold — Pres- 
cott — Niebuhr — Gibbon — Hume— Robertson — Religious element in 
historical style — Lord Mahon — Macaulay's History — Historical ro- 
mance — Waverley Novels — The pulpit — Sydney Smith — Manning — 
Poetry of the early part of the century — Bowles and Rogers — Camp- 
bell — Coleridge's Christabel — Lay of the Last Minstrel — Scott's 
poetry. 

In my last lecture, I noticed the date of the death of Cow- 
per, in the year 1800, as conveniently marking the close of 
the literature of the eighteenth century. The excellence of 
his prose, as well as of his poetry, and his share in that 
literary revival which began during the latter part of 
that century, make such a use of his name subservient, 
in a reasonable rather than an arbitrary manner, to the 
purposes of literary chronology. We pass thence into 
what may be entitled " The Literature of our own 
Times," or, having nearly completed its era of fifty years, 
" The Literature of the first half of the Nineteenth Cen- 
tury." It has its characteristics — distinctive qualities, 
with their origin from within, in the minds of those whose 
writings make the literature, and from without, in the 
influence exerted on those minds by the world's doings 



* January 21, 1850. 

248 



LITERATURE OF XIX. CENTURY. 



249 



and the world's condition. In the study of literature, it 
is needful, for our knowledge of it, to look at it in its 
relation to civil and political history, in order to under- 
stand how, in a greater or less degree, it takes a colour 
from the times. The mind of no author can dwell so 
aloof from his generation that his thoughts and feelings 
shall be above or beyond outward influences. He is more 
or less what he is, because he is where he is. These 
outward influences affect genius of the highest order, with 
this difference, indeed, that they do not limit or control it, 
but, by its own inborn power, it carries them up, idealized, 
into the highest truth for the perpetual good of all after 
time. 

Looking back to the early and distant eras of English 
literature, it is not difficult to trace the relations between 
the literature and the national history — the record of 
words and the record of actions and events. The full 
and varied outburst of poetry, grave and gay, in Chaucer, 
becomes a more intelligible phenomenon when we think 
of it in association with the chivalry, the enterprise, and the 
cultivation of Edward the Third's long and glorious reign. 
The genius of Spenser and the genius of Shakspeare 
shine with a clearer light when our eyes look at it 
as issuing from the Elizabethan age — that age strenu- 
ous with thoughts and acts, chivalrous, philosophical, 
adventurous, of whose great men it might be said, as 
it was said of one of them, that they were so contem- 
plative you could not believe them active, and so active 
you could not believe them contemplative. Milton's 
great epic seems, at first thought, strangely uncongenial 
to the immediate period of its appearance ; but ceases to 
be so when it is thought of as engendered in those years 



250 



LECTURE EIGHTH. 



of ordeal through which Milton's mind had passed in the 
times of the Civil War, the Commonwealth, and the Pro- 
tectorate. The age that Dryden lived in left a more un- 
resisted impress on his genius — the stamp of a degenerate 
and dissolute generation ; and the pages of Pope have 
their commentary in the reflection they give of an artificial 
and sophisticated state of society— an age of wits and free- 
thinkers; so that when his genius rose to its most imagina- 
tive strain, it could not content itself with a theme less 
stimulant than the revolting story of Abelard and Eloisa. 

When we come to the study of the literature of our 
own times, it is, of course, more difficult to trace the his- 
toric relation of literature, because it is the literature of 
our own times— times which have not yet become a part 
of history. We stand too near them — are, indeed, too much 
in them— to see them clearly, dispassionately, to measure 
the prevailing influences, and understand them justly. We 
cannot yet adventure to speak of the literature of this 
century as hereafter they may do who shall look back to 
it from a distance, when time, and the calm judgments 
time brings along with it, shall group the authors of these 
times in their true places ; and when the narrowness of 
contemporary partiality, or, what is worse, contemporary 
prejudice, shall be expanded to a larger wisdom. 

We cannot err in this, that the half century, now 
nearly completed, has been distinguished by great intel- 
lectual and imaginative activity. The revival, which be- 
gan in the latter part of the last century, was, in a great 
measure, the reaction from the overwrought artifice and 
formality of thought, and feeling, and expression of the 
times that had gone before. The hearts of men began 
to assert once more their claims to what Nature could 



LITERATURE OF XIX. CENTURY. 



251 



give them, and the poets, who are Nature's interpreters. 
Other agencies, besides the simple power of reaction, 
were at work on the European mind, giving it an impulse 
to break through old and contracted conventional re- 
straints, calling forth freer movements of thought and 
feeling. I refer especially to the general agitation 
throughout Europe consequent on the French Revolu- 
tion. Change was the condition of the closing years of 
the last century. Things which had endured for ages 
were perishing, not by slow gradations of decay, but by 
quick and unlooked-for violence. Time-honoured insti- 
tutions were not suffered to attain the limit of their natu- 
ral existence, and then to sink under the gradual accumu- 
lation of years, but were swiftly swept away by a new 
compulsion. The clenched hand of prescriptive tyranny 
was forced to loose its grasp ; and if simpler generations 
of men, in the olden time, had held to the fond belief 
that 

" Not all the water in the rough, rude sea 
Can wash the balm from an anointed king," 

men of the new times were ready to shed the blood of 
king and queen with pitiless contempt. The people in 
one of the central monarchies of Europe had suddenly 
started up, and, casting away respect for prerogative, 
boldly questioned the authority of a power which so long 
had trampled on them. Men began to ask why the boun- 
ties of heaven should be garnered up for the bloated luxury 
of the few, while the many were pining, hungry and 
heart-stricken. The sympathies of Christendom were, for 
a season, enlisted ; and the pulse of other nations began 
to beat quicker. The French Revolution began to assume 
the aspect of a general European revolution. Ancien* 



252 



LECTURE EIGHTH. 



opinions and rules of life were abandoned, and new modes 
of thought and feeling took their place. The political 
revolution became an intellectual and moral one ; for, so 
entire was the subversion of old institutions, that in recon- 
structing society, men were led to speculate on its very ele- 
ments, and on the principles and destiny of human nature — 
speculations which, from a revolutionary forsaking of the 
old paths, too often fostered a self-sufficient and faithless 
philosophy. It was not as in the American Revolution, in 
which our fathers, not clamorous for new privileges, were 
the defenders of old rights — rights as ancient as the Great 
Charter, advocates of the Constitution and the freedom it 
gave, the u good old cause. " But in the revolutionary 
agitation that attended the French Revolution, new creeds 
of liberty were, taught, new doctrines of the rights of man. 
Christianity, with its day of sanctity and repose, sacred 
from the Creation, was banished to make way for a sen- 
sual, brutalizing atheism, with its tenth-day holidays, (I 
cannot call them Sabbaths,) and with its idolatry of human 
reason. Theories of ecclesiastical, political, and social re- 
generation were propagated with apostolic zeal into all 
lands — doctrines which cast a shadow on the spire of every 
village-church, and which, while they gave some wild 
hopes to the down-trodden and the desperate, struck dis- 
may where the domestic virtues were grouped at the once 
secure and happy fireside. It was a commotion of the 
very primal elements of society. The scene was a new 
one — suddenly a new one — in the drama of civilization : 
the power of strange rights was thrust into the hands of 
men ; the burden of strange duties was harnessed on their 
backs. Ancient landmarks, covered with the moss of 
manv years, were torn up. The guidance of principles, 



LITERATURE OF XIX. CENTURY. 



253 



drawn not from any customary or conventional authority, 
but from the depths of human nature, was needed alike 
for those who hailed and those who abhorred the change. 
Men long accustomed to float on the placid waters of a 
river, within sight and reach of safe and smiling shores, 
found themselves suddenly driven out upon a stormy and 
shoreless sea; and, in their peril, some were earnestly 
gazing for a beacon-light from the lost coast, others were 
idly gazing at the flashing fires that crest the dark billows 
of the deep, and a few were looking upward hopefully for 
some star in the clouded sky. The agitation of the times 
carried some minds into the delusions of sophistry and 
irreverence, but it also led others into deeper moods of 
thought and larger sympathies. Superficial precepts, 
whether in government, philosophy, or literature, were not 
enough; but there was needed what should deal with 
human nature with a deeper and truer wisdom. This in- 
fluence, either direct or indirect, extended over all depart- 
ments of thought and action, and thus made its impression 
on European literature, on English literature, for the per- 
turbation of the times stirred the mind of England, though 
it did not shake her ancient constitution. 

When I speak of the agitation consequent on the 
French Revolution, f include all that forms the historic 
era, the revolution itself, the wars of the republic, and the 
wars of the French Empire ; in short, the quarter of a cen- 
tury of tumult and war which closed in 1815 with the bat- 
tle of Waterloo. It has been followed by the thirty years' 
peace, the longest period of tranquillity in modern history 
— perhaps I may say, in the world's history. The increased 
activity and independence of thought that attended the 
political convulsions of Europe, and even then found ex- 

22 



254 



LECTURE EIGHTH. 



pression in literature, continued, and indeed expanded still 
further, in the more genial years of peace that followed.* 
This half century, in which our lot has been cast, has 
been unquestionably one of great and varied intellectual 
activity, distinguished by achievements in the two chief 
departments of thought and inquiry, science and litera- 
ture. Never perhaps have they been cultivated in truer 
proportion, and they have moved forward with harmonious 
progress, giving to mankind the various elements of civili- 
zation and improvement which are respectively in the 
gift of science and literature. In this connection, one 
cannot but feel how fortunate, how providential it was 
that the wonderful results of physical science which this 
century has witnessed were not accomplished in the last 
century, at a time when a low state of religious opinion 
was prevailing, when skepticism was dominant in litera- 
ture ; for at such a time the victories of science over the 
powers of the material universe, instead of raising our 
sense of the Creator's power, and inspiring that humility 
which true science ever cherishes, the more deeply at 
every advance it makes — instead of this, an age of un- 
belief, whose literature had divorced itself from revelation, 
would have been ready to use the results of science to 
decoy men into that insidious atheflm which substitutes 
Nature for God, and would have entangled our spiritual 
nature in the meshes of materialism. The truest culti- 



* Since these words were written, peace, European peaee, is no 
more, and new names of bloody note are adding to the catalogue of 
modern battles. Alma and Inkermann are the last and bloodiest. 
And who, in reading these lectures on the Poetry and Literature of 
)VR language, can hesitate to give his sympathy to those who are 
fighting the battle of civilization ? W. B. R. 



LITERATURE OF XIX. CENTURY. 



2bl 



vation of science and the truest cultivation of literature 
in our day have shown this harmony, that alike for the 
scientific and the literary study of man and nature — for 
the naturalist, for instance, and the poet— there is needed 
the same spirit of humble, willing, dutiful inquiry, a power 
of recipiency as well as of search. The man of science, 
and the poet equally, will miss the truth, if either the 
one or the other be such as has been described as the 
man who " grows to deal boldly with nature, instead of 
reverently following her guidance; who seals his heart 
against her secret influences; who has a theory to main- 
tain, a solution which shall not be disturbed; and once 
possessed of this false cipher, he reads amiss all the 
golden letter* round him/'* 

The intellectual activity of the nineteenth century has 
been displayed in a very extended and various litera- 
ture, in prose and poetry, and in literature on each side 
of the Atlantic. With no disposition to magnify the 
present at the expense of the past, it may, I believe, be 
safely said, in an estimate of the literature of this century, 
that in some departments it has excelled that of the 
previous centuries. This is especially the case in historic 
literature, for never heretofore in English letters has there 
been so true a conception of an historian's duties, so deep 
a sense of the difficulties of his story, and at the same 
time such hopefulness of its powers. It is far better 
understood now than heretofore, that in order to recon- 
struct the testimonies of the past, so as to make not only 
a record but a picture of the men that lived in the past 



* The marginal reference in pencil here is to Bishop Wilberforce, 
but I am unable to verify it. W. B. R. 



256 



LECTURE EIGHTH. 



and the events that belong to it, the historian must pos- 
sess some of the knowledge of the statesman and of the 
powers of the poet and philosopher. In no respect has 
historical literature been more improved than in the 
thorough and laborious processes of research which are 
now demanded at the historian's hands. Thus various 
tracts in the world's history, known formerly with a sort 
of careless familiarity, have been admirably reclaimed by 
the better cultivation, which is rewarded with the recovery 
of abundant materials neglected by an indolent generation. 
It is such dutiful and laborious research, united with other 
high qualifications, which has placed our countryman, Mr. 
Prescott, among the best historians in our times. 

Nor is it only by more accurate methods of research 
that this department of literature is now distinguished. 
A deeper philosophy of history has entered into it. The 
historic sagacity of Niebuhr may be considered as having 
led the way in those processes which give him almost the 
fame of a discoverer, and which have been followed out 
in the history of antiquity by English as well as French 
historians \ so that it may be said, that within the last 
twenty years the whole history of Greece and Eome has 
been not only reconstructed, but fashioned into a more 
life-like reality. Hannibal's campaign in Italy, in the 
posthumous volume of Arnold's History of Rome, is as 
vivid a narrative as could be given of one of Napoleon's 
or Wellington's campaigns. 

It is in these particulars, laborious and accurate research 
and use of historical materials, and in a better science of 
history, that the later writers have entitled themselves to 
a reputation so much worthier than that of the best-known 
historians in the last century. Of those historians, Gib- 



LITERATURE OF XIX. CENTURY. 



257 



bon is the only one whose history preserves to this day 
its authority, on the score of such extensive research and 
deep learning as were required by his large theme. With 
regard to Hume and Robertson, the two most popular his- 
torians, the labours of later students of history have de- 
monstrated that their works are of that indolent and 
superficial character which destroys their authority as 
trustworthy chroniclers. I do not suppose that any care- 
ful and conscientious inquirer after historic truth would at 
the present day consider a question of history determined by 
a statement in the histories of either Hume or Robertson.* 
Another and a very high merit may be claimed for his- 
tory in the English literature of our times : I mean the 
religious element which has been developed in it, and 
most of all by Arnold. This is a noble contrast to the 
aggressive infidelity, and the low and false views attendant 
on it, which vitiates the histories of Gibbon and Hume, cor- 
rupting the learning of the former, and coupling a positive 

* As this volume is passing through the press, my eye has been 
attracted by two contemporary criticisms, though from very different 
sources, on Gibbon and Hume ; the one by Lord John Russell, in a 
recent speech at Bristol, the other by Landor in a poetical contribution 
to the Examiner. The first I have not space to quote or to refer to, 
further than to say it is precisely in accord with Mr. Reed's criticism. 
Of the other, I can cite but a few lines. Of Gibbon the poet well says : 

" There are who blame them for too stately step, 
And words resounding from inflated cheek. 
Words have their proper places, just like men. 
I listen to, nor venture to reprove, 
Large language swelling under gilded domes- 
Byzantine, Syrian, Persepolitan." 
And he concludes : 

" History hath beheld no pile ascend 
So lofty, large, symmetrical as thine." W. B. R. 
22* 



258 LECTURE EIGHTH, 

evil with the defects of the latter; so that history was made 
a godless, infidel study, subservient to the shallow skepti- 
cism of the eighteenth century. With minds blinded to 
Christian truth, and tempers alien from all Christian earn- 
estness, they looked upon religious feeling as either fraud 
or superstition, and so they spoke of it in the narrative of 
portions of the world's history in which the Christian 
church was leading the nations of Europe to the truth. 

It is not only in such offensive, assailant unbelief, as 
Gibbon's and Hume's, that history has been in fault, but 
there has also been the negative fault of the omission of 
all thought of a providential government and guidance of 
the nations of the earth. We are thus tempted to draw 
too broad a line between sacred and profane history, and 
to fancy that there was a providence over the one chosen 
people, but that all the kindred peoples of the earth were 
abandoned to chance, to fate, to any thing but the govern- 
ment of God. Now Arnold's great achievement in his- 
torical science is, that in treating the history of a pagan 
people, he gives to his reader a sense of a divine provi- 
dence over the Roman nation, for the future service of 
Christian truth, at the same time that this religious ele- 
ment is not irreverently obtruded or mingled with incon- 
gruous subjects. When Hume, in his History, reaches 
the end of a splendid era in the English annals, he closes 
it with this meagre reflection, "that the study of the 
early institutions of the country is instructive as showing 
that a mighty fabric of government is built up by a great 
deal of accident, with a very little human foresight and 
wisdom." In our meek hours of faith we are taught that 
not a sparrow falls to the ground without God's providence ; 
and then we turn to the infidel history, to be admonished 



LITERATURE OF XIX, CENTURY. 



that the "kingly common wealth" of England, that has 
swayed the happiness of millions of human beings, and 
from which sprang this vast Kepublic of the West, was 
" built up by accident that there was a little human 
foresight, and all the rest was chance. 

When Arnold was planning his history, he said, " My 
ighest ambition ... is to make my history the very 
reverse of Gibbon in this respect, that whereas the whole 
spirit of his work, from its low morality, is hostile to 
religion, without speaking directly against it; so my 
greatest desire would be, in my history, by its high 
morals and its general tone, to be of use to the cause, with- 
out actually bringing it forward."* 

Besides this high quality, another merit of recent his- 
torical literature is, that it has modified what used to be 
called the " dignity of history," and has blended with it 
more of the lively interest of biography. An excellent 
specimen of such historical composition, an accurate, 
calmly-tempered, and attractive history, will be found in 
Lord Mahon's History of England during an important 
part of the last century. *j* 

In this department of literature the greatest power of 
attraction has been proved in the first volumes of Mr. 
Macaulay's History of England, for they have won a far 
larger number of readers, it is believed, than did any one 
of the Waverley novels in Scott's palmiest day. Such 

* Life and Correspondence, p. 139, Am. ed. 

f There is no work that can be more safely put in the hands of 
the American historical student than Lord Mahon's, not only for its 
tolerant and philosophic views of English affairs, but as enabling a 
reasonable American to feel and understand how his own history 
appears to a generous and friendly foreign observer. Such a process 
is very salutary in this self-complacent meridian, W, B. R, 



260 



LECTURE EIGHTH. 



rapid and wide-spread popularity is proof of power, the 
measure of which will be taken more accurately after the 
lapse of some years than now, when it is new to us. Mr. 
Macaulay's aim, as an historian, is to bring into history a 
greater number and variety of the testimonies of the life of 
the past than history has been in the habit of taking cogni- 
zance of. With great powers of accumulating such mul- 
tifarious memorials of former times, with a dexterous skill 
in combining them, and with a brilliant, effective style, 
he has gained such applause as, perhaps, was never given 
to historian before. It is most attractive and exciting 
reading — the more delightful, if you can lull to sleep all 
questioning of truthfulness, and can bring your mind to 
a passive, submissive recipiency of Mr. Maeaulay's abso- 
lute and contemptuous condemnation of characters you 
might otherwise have been inclined to honour or respect. 
There are few writers who exact from the reader such 
unquestioning obedience — obedience, too, to sarcasm and 
scorn. It has been justly said that an historian's first " great 
qualification is an earnest craving after truth, and utter 
impatience, not of falsehood merely, but of error."* I 
would ask any reader of this work, even with the fresh 
fascination on him, whether, on closing the volumes, he 
feels an assurance of the presence there of such an earnest 
craving after truth. Mr. Macaulay has another ambition, 
fostered, peihaps, by his habit of writing as a reviewer, and 
not yet duly disciplined in him — the ambition, or, as it 
may be more fitly called, the vanity of showy and startling 
display. Of the majestic beauty of quiet and simple 
truth he seems to have no conception. His moral and 
intellectual nature seem not to be justly balanced. This 



* Arnold's Lectures on Modern History, p. 293, 



LITERATURE OF XIX. CENTURY. 



261 



appears in another form of intellectual pride — an absence 
of all genial appreciation of lofty character — heroic or 
saintly — an unbelief in high and earnest moods of 
thought and feeling, and a pride of power in despoiling 
men of the sentiments of reverence and admiration they 
had been glad to bestow. The more habitual those senti- 
ments have been, the greater the power displayed in scat- 
tering them. If Mr. Macaulay should carry his history on 
to that period when it will be necessary for him to treat of 
what he has not as yet thought it worth while to allude 
to, colonial America, as part of England's history, and 
when he will have occasion to speak of Washington and 
Franklin, I venture to predict that the temptation to bid 
the world abate their admiration will be irresistible ; and 
that then some of Mr. Macaulay's American admirers, 
who are now rather intolerant of the least dissent, will 
fain recall some of their present praises. 

It is an easy transition from the historical literature to 
another department, scarce separable from it, and in 
which, also, this century is entitled to a pre-eminence. 
I refer to the " historic romance," especially as developed 
in the Waverley novels. Scott may be said to have cre- 
ated this new department of English letters. Never has 
the true idea of historic fiction been more happily seized 
— the calling up, in a living array, not merely the names, 
but the character, the manners, the thoughts and passions 
of past ages. Two of the finest historical minds of our 
times, Arnold in England and Thierry in France, have 
expressed their high admiration of Scott's remarkable his- 
toric sagacity. With studious and laborious habits of re- 
search, he had large-hearted sympathies, an acute instinct 

of historic truth, and, above all, the truthful creative 
R 



262 



LECTURE EIGHTH. 



power of imagination ; which powers combined, enabled him 
to achieve in prose literature what Shakspeare, with like ori- 
ginality, had accomplished in historical poetry, by his chro- 
nicle plays and the tragedies of Greek and Roman story. 

Apart from their historical value, the Waverley Series 
raised a far higher and truer standard of novel writing 
than had been known before \ giving, instead of the vapid 
sentimentalism and the romantic extravagance and folly 
which had been in fashion, good sense and genuine feel- 
ing, humanity's true character, with its passions, its weak- 
nesses, its virtues, and its heroism, and a company of life- 
like impersonations of womanly character, from the throne 
to the cottage. The services Scott did would be better 
appreciated by comparison with the common run of novels 
in vogue some forty or fifty years ago, which Charles 
Lamb has described as u those scanty intellectual viands 
of the whole female reading public, till a happier genius 
arose and expelled forever the innutritious phantoms 
in which the brain was 'betossed/ the memory puz- 
zled, the sense of when and where confounded among 
the improbable events, the incoherent incidents, the in- 
consistent characters, or no characters, of some third-rate 
love intrigue; . . . persons neither of this world nor of 
any other conceivable one ; an endless string of activities 
without purpose, of purposes destitute of motive."* 

This description of novels ceased to be tolerable to the 
improved taste which Scott created, and the effect of 
which was immediate and manifest. There is perhaps 
reason to apprehend that the good influence has begun 
to wear away, and that another revolution in novel 



* Essay on the Sanity of True Genius. Prose Works, vol. iii. p. 81. 



LITERATURE OF XIX. CENTURY. 26S 

literature is going on- — an appetite for more stimulant 
fiction being fostered, partly by corrupt foreign influences, 
and also by the craving for something more exciting than 
a just and pure imagination gives. 

The literature of our times has been very abundant and 
often excellent in a variety of miscellaneous prose litera- 
ture. In pulpit oratory, voices have been heard that 
bring back the sound of the sacred eloquence of England 
in the age of her great divines. 

Looking to our English prose as an instrument of 
expression, it may be said to have been brought in our 
times to a high state of excellence, for in our con- 
temporary literature it is possible to find passages — charac- 
teristic passages — which bear comparison with the best 
English prose of any former period, combining indeed 
with the merits of the earlier prose new powers suited to 
the new uses that the progress of a people's mind de- 
mands. A high order of excellence of English prose, 
both as to the choice of words, the structure and the 
rhythm of the sentences, is a much rarer attainment than 
people are apt to suppose. It is of such high excellence 
that I speak, when I say that in our contemporary litera- 
ture it is to be found in the prose of Arnold, of Southey, 
of Sydney Smith, and of Byron, and Landor, and in the 
sermons of Manning. A high authority in English 
philology places the prose of Landor as first among 
living authors; — the prose in the " Imaginary Conversa- 
tions/' a work of great but very unequal merit, and also 
in some smaller productions. 

The poetic literature of this half century has displayed 
an abundance that proves an imaginative activity equal 
to the intellectual activity of our times. We are apt 



264 



LECTURE EIGHTH. 



sometimes to yield to the notion that our modem days 
are unpoetic, and that the sphere of imagination has been 
contracted by the influences of later times. But when 
this half century shall be looked back to from a distance, 
the judgment of posterity cannot but be that it was dis- 
tinguished by great poetic fertility and power — a period 
that has produced many elaborate poems of a high order, 
and a large amount of such minor poetry, as may be seen, 
when such poetry is good, shining in modest beauty in 
the same sky with the larger luminaries. Considering 
the number of poets who have been successful in their 
appropriate spheres, the amount, the variety, and the 
merit of the poetry which the nineteenth century has 
already given to English literature, it may be more fitly 
compared with the Elizabethan age, rich as it was in the 
company of poets, than with any other period of our lan- 
guage. Indeed it may be added, that one cause of literary 
power in our times is to be discovered in this, that never be- 
fore has there been such dutiful zeal for the revival and re- 
storation of the elder literature ; never before has that litera- 
ture been so carefully and reverently studied. The best 
criticism on Shakspeare, on Spenser, on Milton, is that 
which this century has produced ; and within the same 
time has there been the most earnest desire to promote 
the study of Bacon and the great divines. 

In attempting to group, with reference to time, the 
poets of the present century — the poets of our own times — 
some curious considerations at once present themselves. 
It is now more than a quarter of a century since the 
.death of Byron and of Shelley, both poets of a younger 
generation than Wordsworth; and we begin to think of 
them as belonging to past times, while the elder poet sur- 



LITERATURE OF XIX. CENTURY. 



265 



vives, now in his eightieth year. But what is more 
remarkable, there are living two poets, who were known 
as poets when Wordsworth was a youth— Bowles and 
Rogers, each on the verge of fourscore and ten. It seems 
scarcely credible that there should be living now a poet 
(I refer to Mr. Rogers) whose first poem was published 
sixty-four years ago, in 1786, fourteen years before the 
death of Cowper, (whom he has survived half a century,) 
and within a twelvemonth after the publication of the 
Task.* A subsequent poem of Rogers, "The Pleasures 
of Memory/' a subject of universal interest agreeably 
presented, established his reputation, and was no doubt 
the prompting of Campbell's poem on " Hope." Rogers' 
higher poetic power is, however, to be found in a later 
work, which, appearing at a time when new poets had 
gained the public ear, never attained the same popularity 
as his earlier poem, which was more fortunate in its time. 
From the poem — I allude to the " Italy" — I am tempted to 
cite one passage for the sake of the fine picture it gives 
of an occurence of which I made a passing mention in a 
former lecture — the interview of Galileo and Milton : 

" Nearer we hail 
Thy sunny slope, Arcetri, sung of old 
For its green vine, dearer to me, to most, 
As dwelt on by that great astronomer, 
Seven years a prisoner at the city- gate ; 
Let in but in his grave-clothes. Sacred be 
His cottage, (justly was it called the Jewel,) 
Sacred the vineyard, where while yet his sight 
Glimmer'd, at blush of dawn, he dress'd his vines, 
Chaunting aloud in gayety of heart 



* This was written in 1850, and now, in 1855, this aged poet still 
lives, the survivor of him who thus spoke of him. W. B. 

23 



266 



LECTURE EIGHTH. 



Some verse of Ariosto. There, unseen, 

In manly beaut} 7 , Milton stood before him, 

Gazing with reverent awe, Milton his guest, 

Just then come forth, all life and enterprise ; 

He in his old age and extremity, 

Blind, at noonday exploring with his staff, 

His eyes upturned as to the golden sun, 

His eyeballs idly rolling. Little then 

Did Galileo think whom he bade welcome, 

That in his hand he held the hand of one 

Who could requite him, who would spread his name 

O'er lands and seas ; great as himself, nay greater : 

Milton, as little, that in him he saw, 

As in a glass, what he himself should be ; 

Destined so soon to fall on evil days 

And evil tongues ; so soon, alas ! to live 

In darkness, and with dangers compassed round, 

And solitude."* 

Of the other aged poet, William Lisle Bowles, who has 
survived so many of his brother bards, 1 can only remark, 
m so cursory a survey of the contemporary literature as 
this must be, that Coleridge acknowledged a deep obliga- 
tion to his poems — a tribute which in itself is proof of 
some beauty and power in them. 

The most decided and marked influence of a contem- 
porary production is that which is known to have been 
exerted by Coleridge's Christabel — an influence that may 
be traced on the genius of Scott, Shelley, and Byron. It 
was an influence that Scott acknowledged with all his 
characteristic frankness, and Byron too, though with more 
reserve, for it was not his habit to acknowledge or per- 
haps to recognise such influences. " Christabel" was 
circulated in manuscript many years before it was pub- 



* Italy, p. 115. 



LITERATURE OF XIX. 



CENTURY. 



267 



lished; and, recited among the poets, it made, especially on 
their minds, an impression that proved an agency of 
poetic inspiration to them. Mr. Lockhart tells us that 
the casual recitation of " Christabel" in Scott's presence 
so " fixed the music of that noble fragment in his memory," 
that it prompted the production of the " Lay of the Last 
Minstrel."* It was a great lesson to the poets, in that it 
disclosed an unknown, or at least forgotten, freedom and 
power in English versification — a music the echoes of 
which are to be heard in the poems both of Scott and 
Byron. The grandeur of its imagery, too, moved the poets 
to whom it was made known, as in that sublime and 
familiar passage on a broken friendship : 

"They stood aloof, the scars remaining, 

Like cliffs which had been rent asunder; 
A dreary sea now flows between ; 

But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder, 
Shall wholly do away, I ween, 
The marks of that which once hath been." 

" Christabel" proved its influence over the poetry that 
followed, by the power with which both the natural and 
the supernatural were imaged in it; in the latter respect, 
particularly, Scott felt the power of the poem. There is 
probably nothing finer of its kind in poetry than those 
passages which tell of the wicked might of witchcraft in 
the eye of the witch, who has assumed a beautiful human 
form : it is first felt as Christabel passes with her by the 
nearly extinct embers on the hall-hearth : 

" They passed the hall that echoes still, 
Pass as lightly as you will ! 
The brands were flat, the brands were dying, 
Amid their own white ashes lying; 



* Lockhart's Scott, vol. iL p. 21i). 



268 



LECTURE EIGHTH. 



But when the lady passed, there came 

A tongue of light, a fit of flame ; 

And Christabel saw the lady's eye, 

And nothing else saw she thereby, 

Save the boss of the shield of Sir Leoline tall, 

Which hung in a murky old niche in the wall." 

And in that other passage, which shows the magic 
might of witchcraft in the witch's eye as she fascinates 
her mute yictim with it ; the shrinking up of the eye, 
:he sudden dilation ao:ain when the look of innocence 
6 3 counterfeited once more, and Christabel's unconscious 
imitation of the serpent-look that fascinated and appalled 
her : 

"A snake's small eye blinks dull and shy, 
And the lady's eyes they shrunk in her head — 
Each shrunk up to a serpent's eye; 
And with somewhat of malice, and more of dread. 
At Christabel she looked askance ! 
One moment — and the sight was fled ! 
But Christabel in dizzy trance, 
Stumbling on the unsteady ground; 
Shuddered aloud, with a hissing sound. 
And Geraldine again turned round ; 
And like a thing that sought relief, 
Bull of wonder and full of grief, 
• She rolled her large bright eyes divine 
Wildly on Sir Leoline. 

The maid, alas ! her thoughts are gone ; 

She nothing sees — no sight but one ! 

The maid devoid of guile and sin, 

I know not how, in fearful wise, 

So deeply had she drunken in 

That look, those shrunken serpent eyes, 

That all her features were resigned 

To this sole image in her mind; 

And passively did imitate 

That look of dull and treacherous hate ! 



LITERATURE OF XIX. CENTURY. 



260 



And thus she stood, in dizzy trance, 
Still picturing that look askance 
With forced, unconscious sympathy, 
Full before her father's view, 
As far as such a look could be 
In eyes so innocent and blue ! 
And when the trance was o'er, the maid 
Paused awhile, and inly prayed : 
Then falling at the Baron's feet, 
' By my Mother's soul do I entreat 
That thou this woman send away !' 
She said : and more she could not say ; 
For what she knew she could not tell, 
O'ermastered by the magic spell." 

It is that description of the serpent-look of the witch's 
eyes that, being read in a company at Lord Byron's, so 
affected Shelley's sensitive fancy that he fainted.* 

Along with the influence of this poem on the imagina- 
tion of Walter Scott, there was blended the influence of 
his long-cherished and studious culture of the early 
minstrelsy, for which he laboured with patriotic as well 
as poetic zeal. The genius of Scott, thus wrought on, 
produced that series of poems which fills a large space in 
the poetic literature of the early part of this century. 
With much of Homeric animation, and with the pathos 
of Greek and British minstrel combined, he sung of the 
chivalry and the rude heroism of the olden time ; and to 
those heroic lays there was given a popularity which was 
dimmed only by the sudden splendour of the speedy and 



* In Moore's Life of Byron, vol. iv. p. 147, is the anecdote which I 
presume is referred to. Lord Byron was most earnest in his admira- 
tion of Christabel. His correspondence is full of it. " I won't have 
any one," he writes to Mr. Murray in 1816, " sneer at Christabel ; it is 
a fine, wild poem." W. B. R. 



2J0 



LECTURE EIGHTH. 



more fervid popularity which was won by the genius of 
Byron. 

There is nothing in literary biography Iner than the 
composure, the magnanimity (rather let me call it) with 
which Scott, making up his mind that he was about to be 
supplanted in popular favour by a greater poet, tranquilly 
turned his genius to a new department of invention, in 
which, as it proved, no rival was to reach him. There is 
truth, too, in what Scott's biographer h. s said of this 
part of his career, that, " Appreciating, as a man of his 
talents could hardly fail to do, the splei>didly original 
glow and depth of Chilcle Harold, Scott always appeared 
to me quite blind to the fact, that in the Griaour, in the 
Bride of Abydos, in Parisina, and, indeed, in all his 
early serious narratives, Byron owed at least half his 
success to clever, though perhaps unconscious, imitation 
of Scott, and no trivial share of the rest to the lavish use 
of materials which Scott never employed, only because 
his genius was, from the beginning to the end of his 
career, under the guidance of high and chivalrous feelings 
of moral rectitude."* 

This last remark recalls the account given of a conver- 
sation of Scott, toward the close of his life, which may 
be mentioned before I pass to the name of Byron. Not 
long before Sir Walter's death, a friend remarked to him 
that he must derive consolation from the reflection that 
his popularity was not owing to works which, in his latter 
moments, he might wish recalled. Scott remained silent 
for a moment, with his eyes fixed on the ground. " When 
he raised them," says the narrator, " as he shook me by 



* Lockhart's Scott, vol. v. p. 31. 



LITERATURE OF XIX. CENTURY. 



271 



the Land, I perceived the light-blue eye sparkling with 
unusual moisture ; he added, i I am drawing near the 
close of my career. I have been, perhaps, the most 
voluminous author of the day, and it is a comfort to me 
to think that I have tried to unsettle no man's faith, to 
corrupt no man's principle, and that I have written 
nothing which, on my death-bed, I should wish blotted."* 
In this utterance of dignified self-complacency, he stands 
justified by the story of his wondrous authorship. With 
regard to Scott's poetry, there are indications that, in the 
calmer judgment of posterity, the world is willing to re- 
store a part, at least, of the fame it too quickly took away. 
It is only the other day that Landor, ranking Scott's 
poems with the classics, has said, 

" The trumpet-blast of Marmion never shook 
The walls of God-built Ilion ; yet what shout 
Of the Achaians swells the heart so high \" 

In the concluding lecture I propose to proceed with 
the general considerations of the literature of this cen- 
tury — its chief productions and influences ; among which 
I desire to speak of the character and influence of Lord 
Byron's poetry, the prose and poetry of Southey, the 
poetry of Wordsworth, the influence of Mr. Carlyle's 
writings, and also of some of the women who, both in 
prose and poetry, have adorned the literature of our times. 



* Lockhart's Scott, vol. x ]» 196. 



LECTUKE IX. 

(Eontemporarg iftteratuw* 

Lord Byron — His popularity and its decline — His power of simple, vigor- 
ous language — Childe Harold — The Dying Gladiator — The Isles of 
Greece — Contrast of Byron's and Shakspeare's creations — Miss Bar- 
rett — Miss Kemble's sonnet — Byron as a poet of nature — His an- 
tagonism to Divine Truth — The Dream, the most faultless of his 
poems — Don Juan — Shelley — Leigh Hunt's remarks on — Carlyle 
— His earnestness — Southey — His historical works — Thalaba — 
Wordsworth — His characteristics — Female authors — Joanna Baillie 
— Miss Edgeworth — Mrs. Kemble — Mrs. Norton — Miss Barrett — ■ 
Cry of the children, &c. 

In bringing this course of lectures toward a conclusion, 
I shall resume the cursory view of the contemporary 
English literature which I began in the last lecture. 
When the literary history of this period shall hereafter 
come to be written, a voluminous chapter will be needed 
for what the EDglish language has given expression to 
within it. During the first quarter of this century, the 
writings of Lord Byron had the most high-wrought and 
wide-spread celebrity. His was the commanding name 
of the day for some ten or twelve years in the first quar- 
ter of this century. Scott, as a poet, calmly withdrew at 
the approach of the new influence. He had probably 
exhausted that fine, but not very deep, vein of poetry, 
which gained him a quick popularity and a permanent 
place among English poets ; he withdrew from the region 



* Thursday, February 28, 1850. 

272 



CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE. 



273 



of verse to pass into those unexplored spaces of the ima- 
gination in which he was to establish his chief fame as 
the great writer of historical romance. 

The popularity of Byron, take it for all in all, was pro- 
bably the most splendid that ever poet was applauded 
and flattered with. His song had larger audience over 
the earth, and on that audience it exerted an unwonted 
fascination, swaying the feelings of multitudes, and mak- 
ing its words and its music familiar on their lips. It was 
popularity too quick grown to last without a large dimi- 
nution ; the love of his poetry was too passionate to 
stand the test of time. It is not worth while now to 
measure the extraneous causes which helped that popu- 
larity : his rank, his beauty, his audacity, the exposure of 
his domestic discord, his foreign adventures, half wan- 
derer, half exile — all were elements in that fascination, 
wherewith all the world watched him and welcomed his 
words. Without meaning, in a lecture in which I have 
so much to dispose of, to dwell on the personal history of 
Lord Byron, let me only remark, in passing, how striking 
is the contrast between the husband's sentimental solicit- 
ing of the world's sympathies, along with a sensual defi- 
ance of all that is most sacred by the laws of God and of 
man ; and, on the other hand, the heroic silence and self- 
control of the wife, and, along with it, a life of devoted 
and toilsome charity, in which trhe has sought the repa- 
ration of her hopes and happiness. Who can question 
which was the injured one ? 

The extraneous causes of Byron's popularity would be 
altogether inadequate to account for it. Much as they 
may have helped it, they alone never could have given it. 
Looking at it now as a matter of literary history, the 



274 



LECTURE NINTH. 



true causes are to be discovered, I believe, both in the 
strength and in the weakness of his genius. If that 
strength had been less than it was, he could not have 
gained the influence he did over the minds of his fellow- 
men : if there had been less of weakness blended with 
his might, he would not have gained that influence so 
widely and so soon. Such is the paradox of poetic popu- 
larity. The same causes will explain the decline of By- 
ron's influence. I mean the extent of that decline, fur- 
nishing a discrimination between what is permanent and 
what is perishable in his poetry. All that I propose to 
do is to notice some of the chief characteristics of his 
poetry, so as to judge thereby of its past popularity and 
the estimation it is now held in. 

Lord Byron gained the public ear, in part, by his com- 
mand of the simple Saxon part of the language. In his 
choice of words, he is one of the most idiomatic of the 
English poets : his genuine English is shown forth in his 
poetry and the vigorous prose style of his letters — the 
English-Latinized words being present in small pro- 
portion. This admirable command of the " best trea- 
sures" of our tongue was not, I think, accompanied with 
an equal power of structure and combination, in the ab- 
sence of which there is betrayed the want of that stu- 
dious and dutiful culture of the language and versification 
which the greatest of the poets recognise as part of their 
discipline, and to which, no doubt — the art and the inspira- 
tion combined — we owe both the exquisite graces of Shaks- 
peare's verse and the magnificent harmonies of Spenser's 
and Milton's. 

With such power over his language, as an organ of 
expression, Byron had other powers which are the poet's 



CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE. 



275 



endowment ; and the one and simple solution of his fame 
is his gift of imagination., accompanied with, or perhaps 
more truly inc aiding, fine poetic sensibilities. Now when 
these sensibilities were in a natural and healthy mood; 
when his heart was open to genuine influences, so that 
there was the true poetic sympathy between the inner 
world of spirit and the outer world of sense; when, in 
short;, Nature had her will with this wayward child, — the 
utterance was a true and beautiful flow of poetic inspira- 
tion, as in tha j tranquil passage in Childe Harold : 

" Clear, placid Leman ! thy contrasted lake 
With the wild world I dwelt in, is a thing 
Which warns me, with its stillness, to forsake 
Earth's troubled waters for a purer spring. 
This '^uiet sail is as a noiseless wing 
To waft me from distraction. Once I loved 
Torn Ocean's roar, but thy soft murmuring 
Sounds sweet as if a sister's voice reproved, 
That I with stern delight should e'er have been so moved. 

It is the hush of night, and all between 
Thy margin and the mountains, dusk, yet clear, 
Mellow'd and mingling, yet distinctly seen, 
Save darken'd Jura, whose capt heights appear 
Precipitously steep ; and drawing near 
There breathes a living fragrance from the shore 
Of flowers yet fresh with childhood; on the ear 
Drops the light drip of the suspended oar, 
Or chirps the grasshopper one good-night carol more." 

This is true poetic description, in which, while the poet 
appears only to express a docile recipiency of what Nature 
bestows, he gives back to be blended with it both his 
own emotion and the light which a poet's imagination 
creates. 

A passage proving higher power is the well-known de- 



276 



LECTURE NINTH. 



scrip tion of the Gladiator, in the same poem. It is a 
higher strain, for it is a description purely visionary — 
telling of no spectacle of the bodily sight— but a reality 
of spiritual vision. The poet stood within the vacant and 
silent circuit of the Coliseum, no sound touching his ear, 
no sight save the ruins reaching his eye, but inspired by 
the local association, and by the image which sculpture 
had made familiar, he sees and hears through centuries ; 
and the thronged amphitheatre rises up before him with 
all the horrid sights and sounds of Rome's brutal sports, 
in his rapt vision of the dying athlete : nay more, (and 
this is the grandest part of the vision, full of a moral 
beauty,) looking to the wild region of the Danube, he 
beholds the distant cottage of the Gladiator, with his chil- 
dren in happy ignorance of the murdered father's misery ) 
and further — such can be a poet's seeing — he beholds 
Alaric and his hosts coming down in vengeance on the 
doomed and guilty city : 

" I see before me the Gladiator lie ; 
He leans upon his hand — his manly brow 
Consents to death, but conquers agony, 
And his droop'd head sinks gradually low — 
And through his side the last drops, ebbing slow 
From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one, 
Like the first of a thunder shower,-* and now 

* This — "the first of a thunder shower," as applied to the heavy 
blood-drops from the Gladiator's wound — always seemed to me a de- 
fective figure ,* but where, in any poem, will any thing be found more 
perfect in its simple illustrative beauty than the lines of Childe 
Harold on the march to Waterloo ? 

"And Ardennes waves above them her green leaves 
Dewy with Nature's tear-drops, as they pass, 
Grieving, if aught inanimate e'er grieves 
Over the unre turning brave." W, B. R. 



CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE. 



277 



The arena swims around him — he is gone 
Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hailed the wretch who won. 

He heard it, but he heeded not — his eyes 
Were with hiy heart, and that was far away: 
He reck'd not of the life he lost, nor prize, 
But where his rude hut by the Danube lay — 
There were his young barbarians all at play, 
There was their Dacian mother — he, their sir©, 
Butcher'd to make a Roman holiday — 
All this rush'd with his blood. — Shall he expire 
And unavenged ? Arise, ye Goths, and glut your ire 1" 

In this, there is genuine poetic vision, genuine feeling; 
in a word, true imaginative power, and wondrous words 
of simple English to give voice to it. 

I would refer to another passage, less striking, but also 
characteristic of Byron's best power, and which I wish to 
cite, because it admirably exemplifies how simple, both in 
conception and in expression, is true poetic sublimity. It 
is the passage in which the poet, assuming the character 
of a Greek, utters his emotion on the plain of Marathon ; 
and the imaginative truth and sublimity of the lines ad- 
mit of a very simple analysis. There are presented two 
of the grandest of earth's natural objects — a range of 
mountains on the one side, and the sea on the other; 
between them a tract of ground hallowed by one of the 
world's greatest battles, the victory that saved Europe 
from Asia's conquest; and that combining power, which is 
one of the chief functions of the imagination — not only 
groups, nay, more than groups — unites these three great 
objects, mountain, plain, and ocean, with all their 
memories, but also vivifies them with the deep emotion 
of the solitary human being standing in the midst of 
them : 

S ■ 24 



278 



LECTURE NINTH. 



"The mountains look on Marathon, 

And Marathon looks on the sea; 
And musing there an houi alone, 

I thought that Greece rmght still be free j 
For standing on the Persian's grave, 
I could not deem myself a slave. 

A king sat on the rocky brow, 

Which looks o'er seaborn Salamis ; 
And ships, by thousands, lay below, 

And men in nations ; all were his ! 
He counted them at break of day; 
And when the sun set, where were they?" 

Such passages illustrate the best moods of Byron's 
genius, and it would be agreeable to unweave more 
of the same description from all that is false and 
morbid in his poetry, but such a process would be 
altogether inadequate for the understanding of that 
poetry and the influence it exerted. When we re- 
member how largely a weak sentimentalism entered into 
that popularity, there can be little doubt that it was won 
by the poet's weakness as well as by his power; by what 
was morbid as well as by what was healthful. We may 
form a judgment now of the character of his poetry, by 
looking at his dealing with what were his two chief 
themes, human character, and the material world — the 
universe of sight and sound. Now with regard to his 
treatment of human character, whether it be in the ex- 
pression of his own thoughts and feelings, or in the 
invention of poetic persons, and whether these inventions 
be meant to be independent of himself, or to shadow 
forth his own nature, there is, in all, disease, deep-seated, 
clinging disease. You search in vain for a single health- 
ful impersonation of humanity; all the creations are hoi- 



CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE. 



279 



low images, with no life or heart in them. Turn to Shaks- 
peare's creations, even those most removed from common 
life, or follow Spenser into the shadowy regions of Fairy 
Land, or Milton into his supernatural spaces, and so faithful 
are their creations to a deep science of humanity, that every 
human heart recognises the truth of them : they live and 
have a reality by virtue of their poetic truthfulness. But 
of Byron's heroes or of his heroines, which is a natural, 
truthful character, such as great poets give for the admi- 
ration or for the admonition of their fellow-beings ? No 
pure and lofty idea of womanhood appeared in his female 
personages ; he scarce lifts them above the sensual soft- 
ness of oriental degradation, investing it in a delusive 
light of false and fanciful sentiment. His male person- 
ages (they are not truthful enough to be called characters) 
are strangely alike in their unreality. "But" (as has 
been justly remarked by the sagacious author of Philip 
Van Artavelde*) " there is yet a worse defect in them. 
Lord Byron's conception of a hero, is an evidence not 
only of scanty materials of knowledge from which to con- 
struct the ideal of a human being, but also of a want of 
perception of what is great or noble in our nature. His 
heroes are creatures abandoned to their passions, and 
essentially, therefore, weak of mind. Strip them of the 
veil of mystery and the trappings of poetry, resolve them 
into their plain realities, and they are such beings as, in 
the eyes of a reader of masculine judgment, would cer- 
tainly excite no sentiment of admiration, even if they did 
not provoke contempt. When the conduct and feelings 
attributed to them are reduced into prose, and brought to 



* Preface to Phiiip Van Artavelde, p. xv* 



280 



LECTURE NINTH. 



the test of a rational consideration, they must be perceived 
to be beings in whom there is no strength, except that of 
their intensely selfish passions; in whom all is vanity; 
their exertions being for vanity under the name of love 
or revenge, and their sufferings for vanity under the name 
of pride. If such beings as these are to be regarded as 
heroical, where in human nature are we to look for what 
is low in sentiment or infirm in character V 

How nobly opposite to Lord Byron's ideal was that 
conception of an heroical character which took life and 
immortality from the hand of Shakspeare : — 

" Give me that man 
That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him 
In my heart's core ; ay, in my heart of heart." 

It was, however, with these fictions, that the popular 
fancy was fascinated, not only because the poet's genius 
gave a charm to them, but because that which addresses 
itself to what is false and morbid in man or woman will 
find a response, happily only for a time. In like manner, 
there was an attraction in the unreserved disclosures which 
the poet was all the while making of his own feelings 
and passions, taking the large concourse of his listeners 
into his confidence; and running through those feelings 
there was the poison of moral disease. On the pages of 
Byron you can scarce escape from some form or other of 
morbid feeling, a vicious egotism, pride, contempt, misan- 
thropy : these are attributes not of strength, but of weak- 
ness; and knowing, as we now do, the story of his career, 
is it not pitiful that one so gifted should have gone whin- 
ing through life, complaining of man, and rebellious of 
God, and all the while self-indulgent alike in sensual and 
sentimental voluptuousness ? It is well said, that if life be 



CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE. 



281 



u ever so unfortunate, a man's folding his hands over it in 
melancholy niood, and suffering himself to be made a 
puppet by it, is a sadly weak proceeding. Most thoughtful 
men have probably some dark fountains in their souls, by 
the side of which, if there were time, and it were decorous, 
they could let their thoughts sit down and wail indefinitely. 
That long Byron wail fascinated men for a time, because 
there is that in human nature."* Herein was the mischief 
that Bvron's poetry did in its season of authority: revers- 
ing the poet's function, which is to heal what is unhealthy, 
to strengthen what is weak, to chasten what is corrupt, 
and to lift up what is sinking down : he fostered what was 
false, ministered to what was morbid, and, moreover, 
tempted them on to the willing delusion that their weak- 
ness was strength. Thus unreal and false habits of feeling 
were engendered, and men and women, under this delu- 
sion, grew sentimental and fantastic, and flattered them- 
selves that there was beauty in the ugliness of pride, that 
there was magnanimity in the littleness of contempt, and 
depth of passion in the shallowness of discontent, and 
majesty in unmanly moodiness and misanthropy. Now all 
this, which came from the Byron teaching, was false both 
in morals and in poetry ; for in this mortal life crowded 
with its realities for every hour of every human being's 
existence, all fantastic and self-occupied sadness is a folly 
and a sin — unmanly in man, unpoetic in the poet, well re- 
buked by a woman-poet's strenuous words : 

"We overstate the ills of life, and take 
Imagination, given us to bring down 
The choirs of singing angels, overshone 
By God's clear glory, — down our earth to rake 



:Ts \v .ci! ; p. 193. 



282 



LECTURE NINTH. 



The dismal snows instead ; flake following flake 

To cover all the corn. "We walk upon 

The shadow of hills across a level thrown, 

And pant like climbers. Near the alder-brake 

We sigh so loud, the nightingale within 

Refuses to sing loud, as else she would. 

brothers! let us leave the shame and sin 

Of taking vainly, in a plaintive mood, 

The holy name of Grief /— holy herein, 

That by the grief of One, came all our good."* 

I know of nothing that more betrays the moral weak- 
ness of Byron, than that he gave so much of his power to 
spread the contagion of a morbid melancholy, the selfish, 
thankless, faithless weariness of life, which another woman- 
poet has justly called a blasphemy : 

" Blaspheme not thou thy sacred life, nor turn 
O'er joys that God hath for a season lent 
Perchance to try thy spirit, and its bent, 
Effeminate soul and base, weakly to mourn. 
There lies no desert in the land of life, 
For e'en that tract that barren est doth seem, 
Laboured of thee in faith and hope, shall teem 
"With heavenly harvests and rich gatherings, rife. 
Haply no more, music and mirth and love, 
And glorious things of old and younger art, 
Shall of thy days make one perpetual feast : 
But when these bright companions all depart, 
Lay there thy head upon the ample breast 
Of Hope, — and thou shalt hear the angels # sing above."f 

In Lord Byron's portraiture of human character, his 
genius was prostituted to a worse abuse, in that it con- 
founds and sophisticates the simplicity of conscience — 
breaks down the barriers between right and wrong, by 
abating the natural abhorrence of crime, and arraying the 



* Sonnet on Exaggeration. Mrs. Browning's Poems, vol. i. p. 34i. 
-f- Pcems by Frances Anne Kemble, p. 150. 



C ON T«E MPOEARY LITERATURE. 



283 



guilfcof even the vilest vice in a false splendour and pride. 
How different from Shakspeare's genuine morality, so 
loyal to the best moral instincts, never making vice at- 
tractive, not tempting us even to look fondly on the 
proud and sinful temper until it be chastened by adver- 
sity, still less holding up for admiration the moral 
monsters in whom one virtue is linked with a thousand 
crimes ! 

Let me next hasten to notice something of the character 
of the poetry of Byron, considered as a poet of nature : I 
mean, of the material world. In the last lecture I had oc- 
casion to remark, that it seemed to me a happy circum- 
stance that the great results in physical science did not 
take place during the low state of religious belief that ex- 
isted in the last century, but were reserved for a better 
period of opinion, which could make those results sub- 
servient to the cause of truth, instead of being perverted 
to the uses of materialism. I would now add that, while 
in our times there has been such active scientific study of 
nature, happily the poetic culture of nature has been no 
less earnest, and thus a deeper knowledge of the marvels 
and the glory of the universe has been promoted both by 
the processes of analysis and observation, and by the pro- 
cesses of the imagination. Let us see how Byron contri- 
buted to this, and what he has done to help his fellow- 
men to the poetic visions of nature. No poet ever enjoyed 
larger or more various opportunities of communing with 
earth and the elements. He was familiar with ocean and 
lake, with Alpine regions, and with Grecian and Italian 
lands and skies. He had a quick susceptibility to all that 
is grand and beautiful in the world of sense ; as he wandered 
over the earth. 



284 



LECTURE NINTH. 



" The sounding cataract 
Haunted (hirn) like a passion : the tall rock, 
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, 
Their colours and their forms, were then to (him) 
An appetite ; a feeling and a love 
That had no need of a remoter charm, 
By thought supplied, nor any interest 
Unborrowed from the eye/'* 

But his love of nature was not only passionate ; it was 
thoughtful and imaginative. He knew that true poetic 
description must go beyond the rapture which mere bodily 
sight can give, and deal with all of which this material 
world is symbolical. His strong poetic instincts, when 
they chanced to be associated with true and healthy feel- 
ing, gave forth often grand or beautiful description ; he 
aspired to the highest reach of poetic description of nature, 
for of himself he said, 

" With the stars 
And the quick spirit of the universe 
He held his dialogues ; and they did teach 
To him the magic of their mysteries. 
To him the book of night was open'd wide, 
And the voices from the deep abyss revealM 
A marvel and a secret."f 

But these aspirations were frustrated, for a moral weak- 
ness perverted and lowered them, causing an inequality in 
his poetry which it is lamentable to look at. At one 
moment we believe that we are about to behold him 

" Springing from crystal step to crystal step, 
In the bright air, where none can follow him j w J 

but straightway we see the winged energy dragged down 



* Wordsworth's Lines written abore Tintern Abbey. Works, p. 159. 
f The Dream, stanza viii. 

J Landor, Imaginary Conversation, vol. iii. p. 363. 



CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE. 



285 



to earth, soiled with earthy things, and stumbling in the 
darkness and the mire of low and turbid passions. Aspir- 
ing to commune with the infinite, the poet's heart, and 
therefore his genius too, were cramped within the narrow 
confines of petty pride and weak hatred. The blindness 
of idolatry came over him. The world of sight and sound 
became a divinity to him. That which was meant for 
only a means to higher ends was made all in all to him. 
The material world, framed as it so wondrously is, to 
minister not only to our bodily wants, but to the imagi 
native appetites which feed on the grand and the beauti- 
ful, hemmed his faithless spirit in; and the genius of 
Byron had not power enough to extricate him from the 
shallow sophistries of materialism. His strong passion 
for nature, divorcing itself from the vision of faith, began 
to spread itself in misty rhapsodies, meaningless of every 
thing but the old errors of sensuous systems of unbelief. 
When Byron's poetry began to utter materialism, it began 
to utter folly, and then it ceases to be poetry, for poetry 
is allied to wisdom, and not to madness. He talked of 
loving earth only for its earthly sake, " becoming a por- 
tion of that around him of high mountains being a feel- 
ing to him ; and 

" That he could see 
Nothing to loathe in nature, save to be 
A link reluctant in that fleshly chain, 
Classed among creatures, when the soul can flee, 
And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain 
Of ocean, and the stars mingle, and not in vain : 
* & * -» * 

And when at length the mind shall be all free 
From what it hates in this degraded form, 
Reft of its carnal life, save what shall be, 
Existent happier in the fly and worm : 



286 



LECTURE NINTH. 



Where elements to elements conform, 
And dust is as it should be, shall I not 
Feel all I see, less dazzling, but more warm ? 
The bodiless thought? The spirit of each pot, 
Of which, even now, I share at times, the immortal lot."* 

Now strip this, and the multitude of passages like it, of 
all that is fantastic ; measure it, as you p> ase, either by 
the practical rules of common sense, or, by what is more 
appropriate, the standard of imaginative truth and wisdom, 
and what is it but the perplexity and the foily of material- 
ism ? What natural instinct, let me ask, is so strong in the 
human heart as that which recoils from the dread anticipa- 
tion that this living flesh of ours, or the cherished features 
of those that are dear to us, will be fed upon by the worms 
in the grave ? — a thought that would crush us down in des- 
perate abasement, but for the one bright hope beyond, and 
then, to think of a poet exulting in the prospect of that 
remnant of his carnal life " existent happier in the worm V 
When Byron is honoured as a great poet of nature, it is 
well to understand where he will lead his disciple, and 
where he will desert him. The material world has high 
and appropriate uses in the building up of our moral being : 
the study of it, in a right and believing spirit, is full of 
instruction; but it is worthless and perilous if we lose 
sight of the great truth of the soul's spiritual supremacy 
over it; that there is implanted in each human being an 
undying particle, destined to outlive not this earth alone, 
but the universe. This poet, " sick of himself for very 
selfishness/' his heart aching with its hollcwness, sent his 
materialized imagination to roam over the world of sense, 
ocean and mountain, seeking what the world could not 



* Childe Harold, canto iii, 72, 74. 



CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE. 



237 



give. "Where shall wisdom be found ? and where is the 
place of understanding ? The depth saith, It is not in 
me, and the sea saith, It is not with me."* 

Now, if we seek a solution of the strange inequality of 
Byron's poetic power, and the perversion and imperfection 
of his descriptions of nature, it is in this happy truth 
that the cultivation of the imagination is dependent on 
the moral feelings ) and all 

" Outward forms, the loftiest, still receive 
Their finer influences from the life within." 

Coleridge, in his Ode on Dejection, tells us that the 
poetic vision of nature is sealed even to that uncongenial 
mood — 

"The wan and heartless mood — 
A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear; 
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief, 
Which finds no natural outlet — no relief 
In word, or sigh, or tear. 

* * * * * 
My genial spirits fail, 

And what can these avail 
To lift the smothering weight from off my breast ? 

It w r ere a vain endeavour, 

Though I should gaze forever 
On that green light that lingers in the "West: 

I may not hope, from outward forms, to win 

The passion and the life, whose fountains are within. 

* * * * # 

From the soul itself must issue forth 

A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud, 

Enveloping the earth ; 
And from the soul itself must there be sent 

A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth — 
Of all sweet sounds the life and element I" 



* Job xxvii\ 12, 14- 



288 



LECTUKE NINTH. 



But if the fountain of the life within be not only 
darkened with dejection, but turbid with evil passions — 
if the soul itself be distempered — it cannot send forth 
" the beautiful and beauty-making power/ ' but, in its 
stead, such perplexed and lurid flashes as burst from the 
genius of Byron. 

That wise expounder of poetic power and of nature, 
the author of " The Modern Painters," has justly said 
that "all egotism and selfish care or regard are, in propor- 
tion to their constancy, destructive of imagination, whose 
play and power depend altogether on our being able to 
forget ourselves, and enter, like possessing spirits, into the 
bodies of things about us."* Now there is deep instruc- 
tion in this — that, whenever Byron's imagination rose 
above that selfishness which was his clinging vice, his 
greatest power was displayed ; and it is woful to see how 
often this leprosy is breaking out on the poet's brow as 
he stands by the incense-altar. 

There is this further admonition in all that Byron failed 
in — an admonition plain and irresistible— that just so far 
as poet or philosopher places himself in antagonism to 
Divine Truth, so far must he fail in all that he adven- 
tures in the deep things of nature, . of man, of his own 
soul. " Science," it has been justly said, " in the hands 
of infidelity, degenerates into crumbling materialism : it 
is blind to the beauty, deaf to the harmony of the uni- 
verse; as its objects rise, it sinks; when it comes to treat 
of human nature, its views are base and degrading ; its 
morality is a matter of barter, or a wary drifting along 
before the animal impulses. And what can the poetry 



* Ruskin's Modern Painters, vol. ii. p. ISO. 



CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE. 



239 



of infidelity be, except a deifying of the senses and the 
passions, while the consciousness of higher cravings 
and aspirations, which cannot be wholly extinguished, 
vents itself in bursts of self-mockery, or in the cold sneer 
of derision and contempt for all mankind?"* The highest- 
truth and grandeur that pagan poetry attained, what were 
they but aspirations for the coming Christian truth ? 
And when, in Christian times, the poet rejects that truth, 
refusing its light, he takes up his abode in darkness 
deeper than the heathen's, and it is impossible for him to 
comprehend, much less expound, nature, himself, or his 
fellow-men ; for nowhere can the unaided, solitary mind 
of man travel, whether it be into his own moral and spi- 
ritual nature, with the mysterious tribunal of conscience, 
so weak and so strong, or into the hearts of mankind, or 
to the mute creation, or into the spaces of the universe, 
to the blade of grass at our feet, or the most distant star 
in the firmament, — nowhere can it travel, but it shall find 
itself baffled by mystery — mystery, the burden of which 
grows heavier and heavier the farther it is removed from 
the only truth that can solve it : 

" For the soul, 
At every step when she around her cell, 
Sees, yet adores not the Adorable. 
More faint and faint the gleams which with Him dwell,, 
Break out on her ; more feebly His dear voice, 
That which alone bids nature to rejoice, 
More faint and faint she hears ; till all alone, 
From scene to scene of doubt, she wanders on 



* The Mission of the Comforter, by Julius Charles Hare, vol. i. 
p. 200. 

25 



290 



LECTURE NINTH 



Along a dreary waste, starless and long, 
Starless and sad, a dreary waste along, 
Uncheer'd, unsatisfied, for evermore 
Companionless, and fatherless, and poor."* 

With a mind too vigorous for inaction, and a temper 
too proud and wilful for either the moral or intellectual 
discipline which the greatest writers recognise as a duty 
they ask no exemption from, Lord Byron, amid the 
large variety of his productions, has left no one elaborate, 
well-sustained poem; and the evidence of his genius ib 
to be found in passages or in the short poems, such as the 
"Prisoner of Chitton" or, what is perhaps the first and 
most faultless of his poems, (which I should be glad to 
pause on,) " The Dream." 

If a fitful irregularity was characteristic of this splendid 
career of authorship, no less so was the close of it. Ail 
restraint growing more vexatious and burdensome to him, 
whether the discipline of his art, the discipline of society, 
or the discipline of conscience, he fashioned that ribald 
poem, Don Juan, to let his fancy riot in. It was an igno- 
minious retreat for genius, the last act of self-degradation. 
I cite one stanza from it, to show, by a contrast that shall 
follow, to what base uses a poet can bring his talent. He 
looks at the metropolis of England, with the dome of St. 
Paul's, sublime in magnitude, and venerable by the devo- 
tions of many generations — the dead and the living — and 
thus he images it : 

"A mighty mass of brick, and smoke, and shipping, 
Dirty and dusky, but as wide as eye 
Could reach, with here and there a sail just skipping 
In sight — then lost amidst a forestry 



* The Christian Scholar, by the author of The Cathedral, p. 255. 



CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE. 



291 



Of masts ; — a wilderness of steeples peeping 
On tiptoe through their sea-coal canopy; 
A huge, iim cupola, like a foolscap crown 
On a fool's head — and this is London-town !"* 

I do not pause to say what pitiable prostitution this is 
of the poetic talent, corrupting the fancy with such a 
nean association of poor and heartless wit ; but, in the 
ontrast, let me sweep the scoff from out your thoughts 
by a short sentence, not clothed in verse, but overflowing 
with poetry, not graced with metrical music, but glowing 
with the purity and the grandeur of imaginative truth: 
" It was only the other morning," says the living writer 
from whom I <{uote, "as I was crossing one of the bridges 
which bear us from our mighty metropolis, that para- 
mount city of the earth, that I was struck, for the thou- 
sandth time it may be, by the majesty with which the 
dome dedicated to the apostle of the Gentiles rises out of 
the surrounding sea of houses ; and I could not but feel 
what a noble type it is of the city set upon a hill; I 
could not but acknowledge that thus it behooves the 
church to rise out of the world, with her feet amid the 
world, with her head girt only by the sky.""j" 

Byron's career of authorship and life brought him, 
it might be said almost without exaggeration, super- 
annuated at the age of thirty-seven, to the grave. There 
is a passage in " Manfred" which has, I think, a fearful 
significancy as an image of that proud defiance with which 
Byron thrust away what alone could have restored a 
heart wasted with self-indulgence, wounded with self- 
torment. The lines tell of the death of Otho : 



* Don Juan, canto x. v. 82. 

f Archdeacon Hare's charge at Lewes, in 1840, p. 6. 



292 LECTURE NINTH. 

"When Rome's sixth emperor was near his last, 
The victim of a self-inflicted wound, 
To shun the torments of a public death 
From senates once his slaves, a certain soldier, 
With show of loyal pity, would have stanched 
The gushing throat with his officious robe ; 
The dying Roman thrust him back, and said — 
Some empire still in his expiring glance, — 
'It is too late/ " 

"While the influence of Lord Byron's poetry has declined, 
(how rarely now is it quoted !) the estimation of Shelley's . 
genius has risen. With fine poetic endowment, both of 
imagination and feeling, and with a willing spirit of poetic 
discipline by the study of his art, his mind, unhappily, was 
bewildered in the mazes and the misery of a speculative 
skepticism, which possibly a nature generous, sincere, and 
enthusiastic as his, might have outgrown in a longer life. 
There was an earnestness in his character that elevates 
his memory above that of Byron, but the cloud of unbelief 
brought kindred confusion over his vision, as when he 
speaks of life and death : 

"In this life 
Of error, ignorance, and strife, 
Where nothing is, but all things seem, 
And we the shadows of a dream, 
It is a modest creed, and yet 
Pleasant, if one considers it, 
To own that death itself must be 
Like all the rest, a mockery."* 

In the beautiful lines written among the Euganean 
Hills, you cannot but see how Shelley's profound sense of 
the beauty of earth is imbittered by the gloom of infidelity : 



* The Sensitive Plant, Shelley's Works, vol. iii. p. 1. 



CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE, 



293 



" Many a green isle needs must be 
In the deep, wide sea of misery ; 
Or the mariner, worn and wan, 
Never thus couid voyage on, 
Day and night, and night and day, 
Drifting on his weary way, 
With the solid darkness black 
Closing round his vessel's track, 
While above the sunless sky, 
Big with clouds, hangs heavily." 

It is no untruthful tenderness that has described Shel- 
ley as " an unhappy enthusiast, who, through a calami- 
tous combination of circumstances, galling and fretting ? 
morbidly sensitive temperament, became a fanatical hater 
of the perversions and distortions conjured up by his own 
feverish imagination. . . . He was under the miserable 
delusion of hating, under the name of Christianity, what 
was not Christianity itself, but rather a medley of anti- 
christian notions which he blindly identified with it." 

Considering how pure Shelley's poetry is from all such 
sensual depravity as vitiates the pages of Byron, and how 
earnest he was in speculations he believed to be for the 
good of his fellow-men, one would fain look with pity on 
his errors as well as on his tragic death. It is with an 
honest power of friendship that Leigh Hunt says of Shel- 
ley, that " Whether interrogating nature in the icy soli- 
tudes of Chamouny, or thrilling with the lark in the sun- 
shine, or shedding indignant tears with sorrow and poverty, 
or pulling flowers like a child in the field, or pitching 
himself back into the depths of time and space, and dis- 
coursing with the first forms and gigantic shadows of 
creation, he is alike in earnest and at home."* A more 



* Book of Gems, vol. i. p. 40. 
T 2$* 



294 



LECTURE NINTH. 



sober judgment, well describing a great deal of Shelley's 
poetry, is given by Mr. Henry Taylor, m the preface to 
Philip Van Artavelde : u Much beauty, exceeding splen- 
dour of diction and imagery, cannot but be perceived in 
his poetry, as well as exquisite charms of versification; 
and a reader of an apprehensive fancy will doubtless be 
entranced while he reads ; but when he shall have closed 
the volume, and considered within himself what it has 
added to his stock of permanent impressions, of recurring 
thoughts, of pregnant recollections, he will probably find 
his stores in this kind no more enriched by having read 
Mr. Shelley's poems, than by having gazed on so many 
gorgeously coloured clouds in an evening sky : surpassingly 
beautiful they were while before his eyes ; but forasmuch 
as they had no relevancy to his life, past or future, the 
impression upon the memory barely survived that upon 
the senses." 

In even the most cursory survey of the literature of 
our times, it becomes a part of its history that one of the 
prose-writers, who has made a strong and peculiar impres- 
sion on many thoughtful intellects, is Thomas Carlyle. 
Converting simple English speech into a strange Teu- 
tonic dialect, he uses a style which, while it is odious and 
repulsive to some, seems, by a sort of fascination, to com- 
pel the attention of others ; and yet this uncouth style, 
so alien from what the use of centuries has proved to be 
genuine English, that it almost sounds like the making 
strange noises to gain and force a hearing, is so redeemed 
by the author's vigour, and is in such affinity with the 
strangeness of imagery and illustration with which he 
utters his strong thinking and hearty feeling, that one is 
willing to look on it, not as affectation, but as the natural 



CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE. 



expression of such a mind — a fashion of speech for him- 
self alone. The impression Mr. Carlyle has made is 
owing, no doubt, chiefly to his intense earnestness; and 
he has done good service in teaching men the worthless- 
ness of all formality from which the truth has died out, 
and by exposing unreality, mockery — the forms of un- 
truthfulness and counterfeit, described by the emphatic, 
homely term, " sham." The time has not yet come for a 
full estimate of Mr. Carlyle' s genius ; for there is not 
assurance enough whither he may lead his disciples. A 
deep sense of earnestness does not give all the moral se- 
curity that is needed; for vice has its earnestness, far 
less real indeed, as well as virtue; and thus the mere 
sense of earnestness, though for the most part giving 
good guidance, may betray, if it be not held in just sub- 
ordination to the supremacy of the sense of truth. The 
admiration of power, as in Carlyle's just tribute to all the 
robust reality of Dr. Johnson's character, may be appro- 
priate and wise ; but, gazing too much at mere power, it 
may disparage the sense of right, or rather confound 
might with right. The readers of Mr. Carlyle' s writings 
therefore, while they may draw moral good and wisdom 
from them, must needs follow him with some caution, for 
he may lead them into strange places. When I consider 
what the English language, in all its natural simplicity, 
and beauty, and majesty, has been in the hands of the 
great masters of it, whether in prose or verse, I cannot 
divest myself of a misgiving that such strange and self- 
willed use as Mr. Carlyle makes of his mother-tongue is 
a symptom of something unsound in the constitution of 
his mind. 

I pass, by an association of contrast, to Southey, whose 



296 



LECTURE NINTH. 



use of the language shows that natural and scholarlike 
beauty which is an element of his reputation, both as a 
prose-writer and a poet. His career of authorship, in 
both departments, has been most remarkable : in prose, 
embracing, with much miscellaneous essay-writing of a 
high order, one of the most popular biographies in our 
literature, the Life of Nelson, and a learned and elabo- 
rate historical work, such as his History of Brazil ; and 
in poetry the political odes, resembling Milton's poli- 
tical poems in power, a great variety of minor pieces, 
and such extended productions as the heroic narra- 
tive poem of Roderic, and those highest efforts of his 
genius, the poems in which he brought Asiatic forms 
into the service of Christian poetry and truth, spiritual- 
izing those forms of error as Spenser hallowed and puri- 
fied chivalry and its customs. The most attractive of 
these poems is Thalaba — the finest achievement, perhaps, 
of what has been well styled Southey's judicious daring 
in supernatural poetry. It shadows forth, as its pervad- 
ing but not obtruded moral, the war and victory of faith, 
a spiritual triumph over the world and evil powers, and 
thus is one of the great sacred poems in our literature. 
I should have been glad of an opportunity to show 
more fully the high imaginative character of this poem, 
and how much interest may be found in the study 
of it. I can now do little more than remark that the 
poet has taken not so much Mohammedanism, (certainly 
xiot at all in its impurity,) but " a system of belief and 
worship developed under the covenant with Ishmael," a 
remnant of patriarchal faith traditional among the pure and 
the believing in Arabia ; and upon it he has brought the 
light of Christian imagination to shine, as the angel's face 



CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE. 297 

beamed on the fugitive bondwoman when he bade her 
turn her wandering footsteps home again, and opened for 
her outcast and fainting child a fountain in the desert 
" Thalaba" is a poetic story of faith — its spiritual birth, 
its might, its trials, and its victory — such a story as none 
but a Christian poet could have told. As you follow the 
hero along his wondrous career to its sublime and pathetio 
close, the feeling which the rapt imagination retains is a 
deep sense of the majestic strength given to the soul of 
man when God breathes into it the spirit of faith. It 
has been truly remarked of Shakspeare's dramas, that the 
opening scene always bears an impress characteristic of 
the sequel ; and never was the same principle of art more 
finely proved than in the beautiful opening stanzas of 
Thalaba — not least admirable in this, the reverential re- 
serve with which they breathe of Scripture truth and 
story : 

"How beautiful is night ! 
A dewy freshness fills the silent air; 
No mist obscures, nor cloud, nor speck, nor stain 
Breaks the serene of heaven ; 
In full orbed -glory yonder moon divine 
Rolls through the dark blue depths. 

Beneath her steady ray 
The desert circle spreads, 
Like the round ocean, girdled with the sky. 
How beautiful is night ! 

Who, at this untimely hour, 
Wanders o'er the desert sands ? 
No station is in view, 
Nor palm-grove, islanded amid the waste. 

The mother and her child, 
The widowed mother, and the fatherless boy,— 
They at this untimely hour 
Wander o'er the desert sands. 



298 



LECTURE NINTH. 



Alas ! the setting sun 
Saw Zeinab in her bliss, 
Hocleirah's wife beloved : 
Alas ! the wife beloved, 
The fruitful mother late, 
Whom, when the daughters of Arabia named, 
They wished their lot like hers,— 
She wanders o'er the desert-sands 

A wretched widow now ; 
The fruitful mother of so fair a race, 

With only one preserved, 
She wanders o'er the wilderness. 
No tear relieved the burthen of her heart ; 
Stunned with the heavy woe, she felt like one 
Half- wakened from a midnight dream of blood: 
But sometimes when the boy 
Would wet her hand with tears, 
And, looking up to her fixed countenance, 
Sob out the name of mother ! then she groaned. 
At length, collecting, Zeinab turn'd her eyes 
To heaven, and praised the Lord; 
' He gave — he takes away !' 

The pious sufferer cried : 
'The Lord our God is goodP 

* * * * 

She cast her eyes around : 
Alas ! no tents were there 
Beside the bending sands ; 
No palm-tree rose to spot the wilderness ; 
The dark blue sky closed round, 
And rested like a dome 
Upon the circling waste — 
She cast her eyes around, 
Famine and thirst were there; 
And then the wretched mother bowed her head 
And wept upon her child." 



During nearly the first forty years of this century did 
Southey devote himself; as long as his powers lasted ; to an 



CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE. 



299 



honourable activity in his country's literature, associating, 
like Scott, in genial companionship with all the good 
and great in the same cause : the record of his life, (his 
son is now giving it to the world,) like the inimitable 
biography of Scott, is not only a personal narrative, but 
a history of the literature of our times. I know not 
where you could look for that history so agreeably told as 
in these two biographies.* 

* My brother was an earnest admirer of Southey, not only of his 
prose and verse, but of his personal character as revealed in his 
writings ; and I well remember the triumphant pleasure he felt and 
expressed to me when the fact was revealed, a few years ago, that 
Southey was not responsible for the ancient acrimony of the Quarterly 
Review toward America. He seemed to exult that his favourite 
had not maligned his country. While he was in England last sum- 
mer, he visited Miss Southey at Keswick; and I am tempted to make 
an extract from one of his letters home, if only to illustrate the gentle 
habit of his mind and current of his thoughts : " As we parted," he 
says, "Katharine Southey said she supposed I wished to see the 
church. I said we were on our way there, and she at once offered 
herself and the children for an escort through the fields. The children, 
Edith, and Bertha, and Robert, were sweet, loving, little bodies, who 
kept close to us during the whole visit. A short walk along the hedges 
— it was a beautiful day — brought us to the churchyard, and opposite 
the gate. Miss Southey said she would wait for us and the children. 
They had a winning, affectionate way, that would have charmed 
you, of taking us by the hand and leading the way. We went into 
the church, and saw the very impressive recumbent statue of Southey; 
these recumbent monumental figures are always imposing and solemn, 
this one peculiarly so. The children then took us to Southey's grave. 
While there, the little boy, putting his hands on the tomb, said to his 
sister, <Edy, who in here?' and she told him, * Grandfather/ This 
did not seem to satisfy him, for, coming back, he renewed his question, 
' Edy, who in here V and then she varied her young rhetoric, and 
said, ( Aunt Katy's father and mother/ One spoils, I fear, this prattle 
in repeating it, but on the spot, and with all the asoociations, it was 
delightful." MS. Letter, 19 June, 1S5L About the time this letter 



300 



LECTURE NINTH. 



In this rapid and very inadequate view of contempo- 
rary literature, I have reserved little space for an influ- 
ence which is felt most amply and gratefully where it is 
felt at all, and which, in my belief, will prove the most 



was written, or not long after, Southey's second wife, better known 
as Caroline Bowles, died in a distant part of England; and since her 
death some very interesting though painful letters from her, descrip- 
tive of Southey's latter days of fading or faded intellect, have found 
heir way into the newspapers. I am tempted to make short extracts 
from two of these r dated in 1840, which seem to me very touching i 
. . . . "Nothing gratifying, nothing hopeful, have I now to tell, 
though there is still great cause for thankfulness in continued ex- 
emption from all acute pain and bodily suffering ; but I think thera 
is increased feebleness; and certainly, from week to week, the mental 
failure progresses. Spark after spark goes out of the little light now 
left. Yet a capacity for enjoyment remains ; and, God be thanked ! 
and in his way, he still lives in his books, taking, to all appearance, 
as much delight in them as ever. I have no doubt, however, that 
there is at times a painful consciousness of his condition." .... 
" Of late my dear husband has been less restless in the day-time, 
sitting quietly on the sofa, turning over his leaves for an hour or two 
at a time, so that I have been able to occupy myself a little, as of 
old, with my pencil; .... and now my latest and perhaps last 
attempt satisfies even me, for I have somehow made out an excellent 
likeness of that dear husband, of whom there has never yet been 
a resembling portrait. .... Here is a chapter of egotism, but 
never was Raphael so contented with the most glorious of his works 
as I with this, my poor defective drawing. ' Yes, this me/ was the 
remark of my dear husband when I showed it to him." 

I cannot refrain from still farther extending this note by a poem 
commemorative of Southey by Landor, which I find in the Annual 
Register for 1853 — a book, by-the-by, let me say, where year after 
year, when there is any current poetry, beautiful selections are always 
to be found. It is quoted from " The Last Fruits of an Old Tree 

u It was a dream, (ah ! what is not a dream ?) 
In which I wandered through a boundless space 
Peopled by those that peopled earth erewhile. 



CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE. 



301 



permanent poetic influence of these times : I refer, I need 
hardly add, to the poetry of Wordsworth, of which, it 
might have been expected, I should have made room to 
speak more at large. I should certainly have rejoiced in 



But who conducted me ? That gentle Power, 
Gentle as Death, Death's brother. On his brow 
Some have seen poppies ; and perhaps among 
The many flowers about his wavy curls 
Poppies there might be ; roses I am sure 
I saw, and dimmer amaranths between. 
Lightly I thought I lept across a grave 
Smelling of cool fresh turf, and sweet it smelt, 
I would, but must not linger ; I must on, 
To tell my dream before forgetfulness 
Sweeps it away, or breaks or changes it. 
I was among the Shades, (if Shades they were,) 
And lookt around me for some friendly hand 
To guide me on my way, and tell me all 
That compast me arouDd. I wisht to find 
One no less firm or ready than the guide 
Of Alighieri, trustier far than he, 
Higher in intellect, more conversant 
With earth and heaven, and what so lies between. 
He stood before me — Southey. ' Thou art he/ 
Said I, ' whom I was wishing/ ' That I know,' 
Replied the genial voice and radiant eye. 
'We may be questioned, question we may not; 
For that might cause to bubble forth again 
Some bitter spring which crost the pleasantest 
And shadiest of our paths/ ' I do not ask/ 
Said I, ' about your happiness ,• I see 
The same serenity as when we walkt 
Along the downs of Clifton. Fifty years 
Have rolled behind us since that summer-tide, 
Nor thirty fewer since along the lake 
Of Lario, to Bellagio villa-crowned, 
Thro' the crisp waves I urged my sideling bark, 
26 



302 LECTURE NINTH. 

the opportunity of deepening the sense of thoughtful 
admiration and gratitude to Wordsworth's genius in any 
mind that has already possessed itself of the treasures of 
such emotions, and possibly of persuading some so to 
approach that poetry as to find in it, what it can surely 
give to all who are willing as well as worthy to find it — 
a ministry of wisdom and happiness, both in the homely 
realities of daily life, and in the deepest spiritual recesses 
of our being. But such a theme transcends the limits 
now left for me; and I propose therefore only to notice 
two or three points having a connection with subjects I 
have already had occasion to speak of. With regard to 
language, an English editor of Words worth has said, 
" By no great poet, besides Shakspeare, has the Eng- 
lish tongue been used with equal purity, and yet such 
flexible command of its resources. Spenser gives us too 
many obsolete forms, Milton too much un-English syntax, 
to make either of them available for the purpose of train- 



Amid sweet salutation off the shore 

From lordly Milan's proudly courteous dames/ 

'Landor ! I well remember it/ said he. 

'I had just lost my first-born, only boy, 

And then the heart is tender; lightest things 

Sink into it, and dwell there evermore/ 

The words were not yet spoken when the air 
Blew balmier ; and around the parent's neck 
An angel threw his arms : it was that son. 
' Father ! I felt you wisht me/ said the boy. 
'Behold me here !' 

Gentle the sire's embrace, 
Gentle his tone. i See here your father's friend !' 
He gazed into my face, then meekly said, 
' He whom my father loves hath his reward 
On earth ,* a richer one awaits him here/ " "W. B. R. 



CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE. 



303 



ing the young men of our country in the laws, and 
leading them to apprehend and revere the principles of 
their magnificent language. But in Wordsworth .... 
is the English tongue seen almost in its perfection; its 
powers of delicate expression, its flexible idioms, its vast 
compass, the rich variety of its rhythms, being all dis- 
played in the attractive garb of verse, and yet with a most 
rigorous conformity to the laws of its own syntax/'* This 
high tribute will bear the test of close study; and, let me 
add, that this admirable command of the language is the 
reward of that dutiful culture which is a characteristic 
of the poet. 

In the early part of this lecture, I had occasion to 
speak of those miserable poetic sophistries which tempted 
men and women to think that there is magnanimity in 
the littlenesses of a morbid pride, and poetic beauty in 
dreary moodiness. It was Wordsworth's function, with 
his manly wisdom, with the true feeling of his full-beat- 
ing heart, and with the further-reaching vision of his 
imagination, to sweep these heresies away, showing by his 
own example that 

"A cheerful life is what the Muses love, 
A soaring spirit is their prime delight/'f 

and teaching that lesson, which poetry and morals alike 
should give : 

"If thou he one whose heart the holy forms 
Of young imagination have kept pure, 

Henceforth be warned; and know that Pride, 

Howe'er disguised in its own majesty, 
Is littleness ; that he who feek contempt 



* The advertisement to " Select Pieces from Wordsworth," p. 4. 
t Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew Tree. Works, p. 338. 



304 



LECTURE NINTH. 



For any living thing, hath faculties 

Which he has never used ; that thought with hira 

Is in its infancy. The man whose eye 

Is ever on himself doth look on one, 

The least of Nature's works — one who might move 

The wise man to that scorn which wisdom holds 

Unlawful ever. Oh be wiser, thou ; 

Instructed that true knowledge leads to love, 

True dignity abides with him alone 

Who, in the silent hour of inward thought, 

Can still suspect, and still revere himself, 

In lowliness of heart." 

I have also had occasion to show how morbid and danger- 
ous the love of innocent, inanimate nature may become 
when it is linked with infidelity — how it will sink down 
into a vile and weak materialism. By no poet that ever lived 
has the face of nature, the world of sight and sound, from 
the planetary motions in the heavens down to the restless 
shadow of the smallest flower, been so sedulously studied 
during a long life, and all the utterance his poetry gives 
of that study is meant to inspire 

" The glorious habit by which sense is made 
Subservient still to moral purposes, 
Auxiliar to divine."* 

Never, as in the sensuous and irreligious poets, is the ma- 
terial world suffered to encroach upon the spiritual, still 
less to get dominion over it. So far from any such delu- 
sion, observe how, in that well-known passage in The Ex- 
cursion, the sublimity of which is sometimes overlooked in 
the beauty of the illustration, he proclaims this truth — that 
the universe, this material universe, is a shell, from which 
the ear of Faith can hear mysterious murmurings of the 
J)eity. 



& Excursion, book iv. p. 432. 



CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE. 



305 



"I have seen 
A curious child, who dwelt upon a tract 
Of inland ground, applying to his ear 
The convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell: 
To which, in silence hushed, his very soul 
Listened intensely ; — and his countenance soon 
Brightened with joy; for murmurings from within 
Were heard, sonorous cadences ! whereby, 
To his belief, the monitor expressed 
Mysterious union with its native sea. 
Even such a shell the universe itself 
Is to the ear of Faith."* 

The love of nature thus taught, associated with holy 
thoughts and reverent emotions, is made perpetual enjoy- 
ment, open, too, to every human being : and he who receives 
the poet's teaching may make the poet's words his own : 

" Beauty — a living presence of the earth, 
Surpassing the most fair ideal forms 
Which craft of delicate spirits hath composed 
From earth's materials — waits upon my steps ; 
Pitches her tents before me as I move, 
An hourly neighbour. Paradise, and groves 
Elysian, Fortunate Fields — like those of old 
Sought in the Atlantic main — why should they be 
A history only of departed things, 
Or a mere fiction of what never was ? 
For the discerning intellect of man, 
When wedded to this goodly universe 
In love and holy passion, should find these 
A simple produce of the common day."f 

I had reserved for the conclusion of this lecture some 
notice of the female authors of this century. Ungracious as 
it will be for such a subject, I feel that I must give it a 
brevity considerate of your patience. It is a fine cha- 



* Excursion, book iv. p. 432. 
f Preface to the Excursion, p. 394. 
26* 



306 



LECTURE NINTH. 



racteristic of the literature of our times, that the genius 
of woman has shared largely and honourably in it. It has 
been so, from the share which Joanna Baillie had in the 
restoration of a more truthful tone of poetic feeling, and 
the delightful fictions with which Maria Edgeworth used 
to charm our childhood, down to the later company of 
women who still adorn both prose and poetic literature. 
There have been instances of female authorship in such 
modest retirement that the world has not known them well 
enough. There is much that illustrates the gracefulness 
and delicacy of the womanly mind, but over and above all 
this, and combined with it, the literature of our times has 
developed an energy which womanly authorship had not 
shown before : I do not mean a masculine energy, but a 
genuine womanly power. Those writers who are, I think, 
chiefly distinguished for such power, as well as beauty of 
genius, are Mrs. Jameson, as a prose-writer, and especially 
in her admirable criticisms both on art and literature ; Mrs. 
Kemble, Mrs. Norton, and Mrs. Browning, formerly Miss 
Barrett. Indulge me with a few minutes more for an 
illustration or two of the poetic power I speak of. Every 
person, probably, after youth is passed, is conscious at 
some time of a deep craving for repose, for a tranquillity 
inward and outward : this universal feeling is thus ex- 
pressed in these lines : 

" But to be still ! oh, but to cease a while 
The panting breath and hurrying steps of life, 
The sights, the sounds, the struggle, and the strife, 
Of hourly being ; the sharp biting file 
Of action fretting on the tightened chain 
Of rough existence ; all that is not pain, 
But utter weariness ! oh ! to be free, 
But for a while, from conscious entity ! 



CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE. 



807 



To shut the banging doors and windows wide 
Of restless sense, and let the soul abide, 
Darkly and stilly, for a little space, 
Gathering its strength up to pursue the race ; 
Oh, heavens ! to rest a moment, but to rest, 
From this quick, gasping life, were to be blest !"* 

It is an honourable and characteristic distinction of the 
female authorship of the day that it has devoted itself, in 
several forms, to the cause of suffering humanity. 

"Some there are whose names will live 
Not in the memories, but the hearts of men, 
Because those hearts they comforted and raised 
And where they saw God's images cast down, 
Lifted them up again, and blew the dust 
From the worn features and disfigured Iimb."f 

Would you know what might there is in the voice that 
speaks from a woman-poet's full heart, what power of 
imagination no less than of sympathy and pity, find that 
earnest plea which Elizabeth Barrett uttered against the 
horrid sacrifice to Mammon, which was once the shame of 
Britain's factories. It is entitled "The Cry of the Chil- 
dren." I quote only the opening and closing stanzas: 

" Do ye hear the children weeping, my brothers, 
Ere the sorrow comes with years ? 
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers, 

And that cannot stop their tears. 
The young lambs are bleating in the meadows, 

The young birds are chirping in the nest, 
The young fawns are playing with the shadows, 
The young flowers are blowing toward the West ; 



* Poems by Frances Anne Kemble, p. 151. 

f Landor's Lines to " The Author of Mary Barton," in the Examiner^ 
March 17, 1849. 



808 



LECTURE NINTH. 



But the young, young children, my brothers, 

They are weeping bitterly ; 
They are weeping in the playtime of the others, 

In the country of the free. 

* & * * * * 

They look up with their pale and sunken faces, 

.And their look is dread to see, 
For you think you see their angels in their places, 

"With eyes meant for Deity; 
'How long/ they say, 'how long, cruel nation, 

Will you stand, to move the world, on a child's heart, 
Stifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation, 

And tread onward to your throne amid the mart ? 
Our blood splashes upward, our tyrants, 

And your purple shows your path : 
But the child's sob curseth deeper in the silence 

Than the strong man in his wrath !' " 

I am loth to leave so stern a strain of impassioned verse 
the last in your minds : she speaks with as genuine, but 
a gentler, voice of poetic power in the lines entitled 
"Patience Taught by Nature:" 

" ' dreary life V we cry, ' dreary life !' 
And still the generations of the birds 
Sing through our sighing, and the flocks and herds 
Serenely live, while we are keeping strife, 
With heaven's true purpose in us, as a knife 
Against which we may struggle. Ocean girds, 
Unslackened, the dry land : savannah swards 
Unweary sweep : hills watch unworn ; and rife, 
Meek leaves drop yearly from the forest trees, 
To show, above, the un wasted stars that pass 
In their old glory. thou God of old ! 
Grant me some smaller grace than comes to these ; 
But so much patience, as a blade of grass 
Grows by, contented through the heat and cold."* 



* Mrs. E. Barrett Browning's Poems, vol. i. p. 342. 



LECTURE X. 



tragic anb (Bkgiac ^ojetrg* 

lontrast of subjects, serious and gay — Tragic poetry — Illustrated in his- 
tory — Death of the first-born — Clarendon's raising the standard at 
Nottingham — Moral use of tragic poetry — Allston's criticism — Ele- 
giac poetry — Its power not mere sentimentalism — Gray's Elegy, an 
universal poem — Philip Van Artevelde — Caroline Bowles — "Pau- 
per's Death Bed" — Wordsworth's Elegies — Milton's Lycidas — Ado- 
nais — In Memoriam — Shelley's Poem on Death of Keats — Tennyson 
— In Memoriam reviewed. 

The two lectures I am about to deliver relate to sub- 
jects aside from the continuous course just completed. 
They are, however, illustrative of it, though not part of 
it ; and therefore, I hope, not inappropriate or unwelcome. 
The first lecture relates to the literature of tragedy and 
sorrow, the second to the literature of wit and humour ; 
whether I shall add another to this brief supplementary 
course will depend on personal considerations which I need 
not now refer to. It is not necessary, I hope, for me to 
disclaim, in this arrangement of two of these lectures, all 
attempts at the mere effect of contrast, for it is no ambi- 

* The course of lectures delivered in 1850 terminated with the 
Ninth, on Contemporary Literature. Those that follow, together with 
one on Wordsworth's Prelude, were prepared in March, 1851. I have 
thought it best to add them to this course, as, in a certain degree, illus- 
trative of the general subject of English Literature. The one on the 
Prelude was rather the introduction of a new poem to those who had 
never read it, than a criticism on one that was familiar. It mainly 
consisted of extracts, with brief comment. On this account I do not 
think it worth while now to reproduce it. W. B. R. 

U 309 



310 



LECTURE TENTH, 



tion of mine to catch the attention of my hearers by any 
such artifice, or to startle them with an antithesis of sub- 
jects. My purpose in placing, immediately after the 
serious subjects of the first lecture, the literature of Wit 
and Humour, was rather to show that the transition need 
not be a violent one; that there may be found in litera- 
ture a response to the sad and solemn feelings of our 
nature, and also for its happy and joyous emotions; and 
that over both these departments of letters there may be 
seen shining the same moral light. I have set these sub- 
jects, apparently so different, in close continuity, in the 
hope of thus proving the completeness of such companion- 
ship as books can add to that between living human 
beings — a companionship for life, in shadow or in sunshine ; 
in the hope of showing that there is a wisdom in books 
which holds genial and restorative communion with tears 
and a sorrowing spirit, and no less genial and salutary 
with that other attribute of humanity, smiles and a cheer- 
ful heart. Thus there may be a discipline for faculties 
and powers too often fitfully or unequally indulged or 
cultivated — a discipline of the thoughts and feelings which 
are associated with the sorrows of life, and no less of those 
which have fellowship with its joys and merriment: for 
those who are docile to receive, or sedulous to seek them, 
there are lessons which teach a sanity of sadness and also 
a sanity of gladness. It is, top, a ministry of human sym- 
pathy; for as it explores the sources of genuine grief and 
joy, it not only helps us the better to know our own 
hearts, but to enter into the feelings that are in the hearts 
of our fellow-beings, and thus to " rejoice with them that 
do rejoice, and weep with them that weep." 

Tragic poetry has been well described as " poetry in 



TKAGIC POETRY. 



311 



its deepest earnest." The upper air of poetry is the 
atmosphere of sorrow. This is a truth attested by every 
department of art, the poetry of words, of music, of the 
canvas, and of marble. It is so, because poetry is a re- 
flection of life; and when a man weeps, the passions that 
are stirring within him are mightier than the feelings 
which prompt to cheerfulness or merriment. The smile 
plays on the countenance : the laugh is a momentary and 
noisy impulse ; but the tear rises slowly and silently from 
the deep places of the heart. It is at once the symbol 
and the relief of an overmastering grief, it is the language 
of emotions to which words cannot give utterance : pas- 
sions, whose very might and depth give them a sanctity, 
we instinctively recognise by veiling them from the com- 
mon gaze. In childhood, indeed, when its little griefs and 
joys are blended with that absence of self consciousness, 
which is both the bliss and the beauty of its innocence, 
tears are shed without restraint or disguise : but when the 
self-consciousness of manhood has taught us that tears are 
the expression of emotions too sacred for exposure, the 
heart will often break rather than violate this instinct of 
our nature. Tragic poetry, in dramatic, or epic, or what 
form soever, has its original, its archetype in the sorrows, 
which float like clouds over the days of human existence. 
Afflictions travel across the earth on errands mysterious, 
but merciful, could we but understand them : and the 
poet, fashioning the likeness of them in some sad story, 
teaches the imaginative lesson of their influences upon 
the heart. 

In history, what is there so impressive as when the his- 
toric muse, speaking with the voice of the tragic muse, 
tells of terror and of woe ? If science teaches that this 



312 



LECTURE TENTH. 



earth of ours is a shining planet, the records of history 
as surely teach that it rolls through the spaces of the 
firmament, stained with blood and tears. So has it ever 
been. In the annals of the ancient dynasty of Egypt, 
what is there like that tragic midnight, when the first- 
born of the land were smitten, "from the first-born of 
Pharaoh that sat on the throne, unto the first-born of the 
captive that was in the dungeon :" what in the chronicles 
of Babylon, like that tragic hour, when there came forth 
the fingers of a man's hand, and wrote upon the palace wall 
an empire's doom ? In classic story, what rises up to the 
memory more readily than the heroic sacrifice in the tragic 
pass of Thermopylae ? What pages in the annals of 
our fatherland have a deeper interest than when the 
career of King Charles turned to tragedy, when gloom 
was gathering over his fortunes, from the day when the 
royal standard was raised at Nottingham, and ominously 
cast down in a stormy and unruly night, onward to the 
bloody atonement on the scaffold.* In the history of 

* Clarendon's celebrated description of the raising of the standard 
of Charles the First, at Nottingham, cannot be too often quoted. It is 
very grand and very sad. 

"According to the proclamation," says the historian, "upon the 
twentj^-fifth day of August (1642) the standard was erected about six 
of the clock of the evening of a very stormy and tempestuous day. 
The king himself, with a small train, rode to the top of the castle-hill ; 
Varney, the knight-marshal, who was standard-bearer, carrying the 
standard, which was then erected in that place, with little other cere- 
mony than the sound of drums and trumpets : melancholy men dis- 
cerned many ill presages about that time. There was not one regi- 
ment of foot yet levied and brought thither; so that the trained bands 
which the sheriff had drawn together was all the strength the king 
had for his person or the guard of the standard. There appeared no 
conflux of men in obedience to the proclamation : the arms and ammu- 



TRAGIC POETRY. 313 

France, what passage is there so impressive — as gathering 
into one awful moment a consummation of a long antiquity, 
and casting a dark shadow over the future — as that which 
tells of the descendant of sixty kings, laid bound, hand 
and foot, beneath the glittering axe ? And in our own 
history, what is there so sublime, as when the young 
nation was baptized in blood on its first battle-field ? 

What has been finely called " the power and divinity 
of suffering" is shown also in the moral interest which 
clings to spots sacred by the memory of affliction — an inte- 
rest which prosperous grandeur cannot boast of. A 
thoughtful traveller has thus expressed the feeling on 
visiting the palace of the Doges at Venice : " It is a 
strange building with its multitudinous little marble 
columns and grotesque windows, and the giant staircase 
all glorious of the purest Carrara marble, carved and chi- 
selled into ornaments of the most beautiful minuteness. A 
splendid palace indeed it is : yet, while my eye wandered 
in a few minutes over the gorgeous part of the structure, 
it was long riveted with undiminished interest upon the 
little round holes close to the level of the sullen canal 
beneath the Bridge of Sighs — holes which marked the 
passages to the dungeons beneath the level of the canal, 
where, for years, the victims of that wicked merchant- 
republic were confined. 



nition were not yet come from York, and a general sadness covered 
the whole town, and the king himself appeared more melancholic than 
he used to be. The standard itself was blown down the same night it 
had been set up, by a very strong and unruly wind, and could not be 
fixed again in a day or two, till the tempest was allayed. This was 
the melancholy state of the king's atfairs when the standard was set 
up." History of the Rebellion, book v. p. 308. W. B. R. 

27 



314 LECTURE TENTH. 

u And why is it that suffering should have a spell to 
fix the eye above the power of beauty or of greatness ? Is 
it because the cross is a religion of suffering, a faith of suf- 
fering, a privilege of suffering, a perfection arrived at by and 
through suffering only? Half an hour was enough for 
the ducal palace. I could gaze for hours upon those dun- 
geon-holes, gaze and read there, as in an exhaustless volume, 
histories of silent, weary suffering, as it filed the soft heart 
of man away, attenuated his reason into a dull instinct, 
or cracked the stout heart as you would shiver a flint. 

" There is seldom a line of glory written upon the 
earth's face, but a line of suffering runs parallel with it; 
and they that read the lustrous syllables of the one, and 
stoop not to decypher the spotted and worn inscription of 
the other, get the least half of the lesson earth has to 
give."* 

Lord Bacon, in one of those essays in which he has so 
sententiousiy compacted his deep thoughts, said, " Pros- 
perity is the blessing of the Old Testament ; adversity is 
the blessing of the New, which carrieth the greater bene- 
diction and the clearer revelation of God's favour. Yet 
even in the Old Testament, if you listen to David's harp, 
you shall hear as many hearse-like airs as carols : and the 
pencils of the Holy Grhost have laboured more in describ- 
ing the afflictions of Job than the felicities of Solomon. "f 

The moral use of tragic poetry consists then in such 
employment of poetic truth that the poet's sad imaginings 
shall serve to chasten, to elevate, and to strengthen the 



* Sights and Thoughts in Foreign Churches and among Foreign 
Peoples j by Frederick William Faber, M. A. p. 285, 288. 
*(* Essay on Adversity. 



TRAGIC POETRY. 



315 



soul — a moral ministry which justified as sage and solemn 
a spirit as Milton's in speaking of " the lofty, grave trage- 
dians," and styling them " teachers best of moral pru- 
dence, high actions and high passions best describ- 
ing."* And the great critic of antiquity, with all the 
sublime solemnities of his country's tragic drama in his 
thoughts, in the presence, as it were of that spectral mys- 
tery of fate, which overshadowed the Athenian stage, has 
told us that " Tragic poetry is the imitation of serious 
action, employing pity and terror for the purpose of chas- 
tening the passions." 

This discipline, however, it must be borne in mind, can 
have no practical influence on character, if it accomplish 
nothing more than the production of emotions, instead of 
being carried on into action; for it is a great law of our 
moral being that feelings, no matter how amiable and vir- 
tuous, will surely perish, if they be not converted into 
active principles; nay, they may coexist with conduct the 
most - selfish and unfeeling; there may be a worthless 
sentimentalism utterly delusive and negative, and this, 
by due transition, may pass into odious self-indulgence, or 
still more odious inhumanity. In the worst days of the 
French Revolution, the very men who in the theatres 
applauded the heroic sentiments in the tragedies of Cor- 
neille, and were melted even to tears by the pathos of 
Racine, rose upon the morrow's morn to join in the fero- 
cious cries for blood that echoed in the streets of Paris. 

And further, if this example shows how worthless and 
wicked mere sentimentalism may be, self-indulgent in the 
luxury of ideal woe, it also shows that the sight of actual 



* Paradise Regained, book iv. v. 261. 



316 



LECTURE TEN TIL 



suffering may obliterate all sympathy, and harden the 
heart by familiarity with human distress or agony looked 
on as a spectacle. Now it is the function of art, through 
whatever medium it addresses the heart, so to transfigure 
the tragic realities of life, as to make the contemplation 
of them endurable and salutary, which otherwise would 
be appalling, repulsive, and, if repeated, destructive of 
true sensibility. That wise artist, the late Washington 
Allston, speaking with the truest philosophy of his art 
and of human nature, said it is u through the transform- 
ing atmosphere of the imagination (that) alone the sad- 
dest notes of woe, even the appalling shriek of despair, 
are softened, as it were, by the tempering dews of this 
visionary region, ere they fall upon the heart. Else how 
could we stand the smothered moan of Desdemona, or the 
fiendish adjuration of Lady Macbeth, more frightful 
even than the after-deed of her husband, or look upon the 
agony of the wretched Judas, in the terrible picture of 
Rembrandt, when he returns the purchase of blood to the 
impenetrable Sanhedrim ? Ay, how could we ever stand 
these but for that ideal panoply through which we feel 
only their modified vibrations ? Let the imitation be so 
close as to trench on deception, the effect will be far differ- 
ent. I remember/' adds Mr. Allston, " a striking instance 
of this in a celebrated actress, whose copies of actual suf- 
fering were so painfully accurate, that I was forced to turn * 
away from the scene, unable to endure it ; her scream of 
agony in Beividera seemed to ring in my ears for hours 
after. Not so was it with the great Mrs. Siddons, who 
moved not a step but in a poetic atmosphere, through 
which the fiercer passions seemed rather to loom like^ dis- 



ELEGIAC POETRY. 



317 



tant mountains when first descried at sea, massive and 
solid, yet resting on air."* 

I pass from these brief hints, scarcely worthy of a place 
in a lecture on tragic poetry, to that kindred species which 
is found in the literatures of all nations, and which is en- 
titled Elegiac Poetry. Serving, as all true poetry does, for 
a ministry and discipline of feeling, it could not neglect 
that one form of affliction which sooner or later comes to 
every human being — sorrow for the dead. The phases of 
this emotion are as various as the heart or the counte- 
nance. With some it is impetuous and turbulent, stormy 
as a cloud, but it pours down its shower, and then its form 
changes and it melts away, no one can tell whither. The 
passion sometimes is proud and self-willed and rebellious : 
or it is moody and sinks into sullenness. Again, it is 
gentle and resigned, and easy to be entreated. Some- 
times it is social, and delights in the relief of utterance 
and sympathy. With others it holds no communion with 
speech or tears, but dwells in the depths of the silent 
heart. The poet, as an interpreter and guide of humanity, 
and especially as always raising the mind of man above 
the pressure of tangible and temporal things into the 
region of the spiritual and the immortal, finds one of his 
worthiest duties in training this species of sorrow into the 
paths of wisdom. In the small space now at my com- 
mand, I can attempt to notice only a few of the truths 
that the poets in their elegies have taught. Let me first 
say, that there is a spurious form of elegiac poetry, which 
might be dismissed with a word of pity rather than of con- 



* I am unable to verify this citation from Allston. W. B. R. 
27* 



313 



LECTURE TENTH. 



demnation, was it not a counterfeit of that genuine grief 
which is wronged by the imitation. I refer to that form 
which is the expression of unreal and subtly selfish senti- 
mentalising which is not too strongly condemned when it 
is spoken of as "a base lust of the mind, which indulges 
in the excitement of contemplating its own emotion, or 
that of others, for the excitement's sake/'* Such senti- 
ment is often ostentatious, obtrusive, and factitious ; and real 
grief recoils from it into a deeper seclusion. But where 
the feelings are truthful, and poetry gives them worthy 
form, their truth is proved by the prompt and the uni- 
versal response. What else can explain the large accep- 
tation which a poem like G-ray's Elegy in a Country 
Churchyard found at once, and finds to this day, not only 
wherever English words are known, but by translation 
into more languages than any English poem has ever been 
turned into. Indeed, throughout our thoughtful English 
poetry, the duty has ever been worthily recognised of up- 
holding the communion between the living and the dead, 
and of so disciplining sorrow that it shall not be a dreary, 
self-indulgent, self-consuming sentiment, but amoral power, 
diffusing purity and wisdom, and dwelling in the high 
places of humanity. English poetry often speaks in the 
spirit of the elegy, though it may not assume the form of 
it. In that grand historical poem, "Philip Van Arta- 
velde," when the hero, alluding to a stirring and disturbed 
condition of society, says, 

" Lightly is life laid down amongst us now, 
And lightly is death mourned — 
We have not time to mourn 



* North British Review, vol. xiii. p. 551. 



ELEGIAC POETRY. 



819 



his old preceptor, Friar J ohn, makes answer in words that 
contain the whole philosophy of elegiac poetry : 

" The worse for us ! 
He that lacks time to mourn, lacks time to mend. 
Eternity mourns that. 'Tis an ill cure 
For life's worst ills, to have no time to feel them. 
Where sorrow's held intrusive and turned out, 
There wisdom will not enter, nor true power, 
Nor aught that dignifies humanity. 
Yet such the barrenness of busy life !" 

It is the theme of the elegiac poet to show these virtues 
of sorrow, its power to strengthen, to purify, to elevate, 
and to give moral freedom — its strength to consume the 
small troubles which so often waste and weaken our best 
powers. For this the poet needs the genius to look into 
the deepest and most mysterious parts of the human soul, 
to sympathize with its most acute sensibilities, and to 
illustrate all the consolatory agencies which are vouch- 
safed to man. In the first place, the poetic power may do 
a salutary work, by restoring a just sense of the awfulness 
of death — a sense so apt to grow callous, especially in large 
cities, where the solemnities of the grave are a trivial 
spectacle.* The heart loses some of its most natural and 
purest sensibilities when it becomes indifferent to the aspect 
of any of the circumstances or forms of death. An elegy 
on a pauper's death-bed was made to express these truths : 

" Tread softly — bow the head, 
In reverent silence bow — 
No passing bell doth toll ; 
Yet an immortal soul 
Is passing now. 

* History tells, on more occasions than one, that one of the moral 
evils which follow in the path of pestilence, is that men are brutalized 
by the common sight of the dead and the dying. H. R. 



820 



LECTURE TENTH. 



Stranger ! however great. 

With lowly reverence bow : 
There's one in that poor shed, 
One by that paltry bed, 

Greater than thou. 

Beneath that beggar's roof, 

Lo! Death doth keep his state: 

Enter — no crowds attend — 

Enter — no guards defend 
This palace-gate. 

That pavement damp and cold 

No smiling courtiers tread; 
One silent woman stands, 
Lifting with meagre hands 

A dying head. 

No mingling voices sound— 

An infant wail alone ; 
A sob suppressed — again 
That short, deep gasp, and then 

The parting groan. 

Oh ! change — oh ! wondrous change — ■ 

Burst are the prison bars — 
This moment there, so low 
So agonized, and now 

Beyond the stars ! 

Oh ! change — stupendous change ! 
There lies the soulless clod : 

The sun eternal breaks, 

The new immortal wakes- 
Wakes with his God."* 

There might be gathered from English poetry large and 
wise discipline of all the emotions with which the living 
render homage unto the dead ; and the thoughtful student 
would find his recompense in it. The laments of Spen- 



* The Birth-day, and other Poems, by Caroline Bowles, p. 227. 



ELEGIAC POETRY, 



321 



ser are full of the tender sensitiveness of that gentle bard : 
the class of poems which Wordsworth has left under the 
title of Elegies abound in the "true poetic teaching of 
wise, strong-hearted Christian sorrow." I must, however, 
confine myself to three elegiac poems, the most remark- 
able in our language : Milton's " Lycidas," Shelley's 
"Adonais," and Mr. Tennyson's " In Memoriam." These 
poems may well be grouped together from the similarity 
of the occasions, and for the high, the varied imaginative 
power displayed in them. Each is a lament over the 
death of a friend of high intellectual and moral promise, 
called away in early manhood. The " Lycidas" is fash- 
ioned in a great degree by the spirit of classical elegy; the 
element of Christian belief present, however, in it. In 
Shelley's poem on the death of Keats the classical form 
is ye^t more manifest in purposed imitations of the Greek 
elegies.* That unhappy enthusiast, Shelley, with all his 
purity of character and loftiness of genius, could couple 
with classical imagery only the reveries of a bewildered 
unbelief. There is, in reading his poem, a feeling of 
deeper sorrow for the poet that wrote than for him that was 
lamented. The highest consolation, his fine imagination 



* My attention has been specially called to the extent of these imi- 
tations, by a list of parallel passages in the Greek elegies, prepared 
by two of my former pupils, who have preserved their zeal for litera- 
ture, ancient and modern, amid their professional studies. H. R. 

The accomplished scholars to whom my brother refers, are William 
Arthur Jackson and Gr. Hermann Robinett. Mr. Jackson has kindly 
placed at my disposal his notes on these parallelisms, and I regret 
that I have not room to print them here. Let me add, for I shall have 
no other chance of noting it, that my brother felt very high pride in 
the scholars of the University, who, having been reared by him, had 
not forgotten his precepts or their early studies. W, B. R. 



322 



LECTURE TENTH. 



can reach to, is that his dead friend lives as a portion of 
the universe : 

" He is made one with nature : there is heard 
His voice in all her music, from the moan 
Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird ; 
He is a presence to be felt and known 
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone, 
Spreading itself where'er that power may move, 
Which has withdrawn his being to its own ; 
"Which wields the world with never-wearied love, 
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above. 
He is a portion of the loveliness 
Which once he made more lovely/' 

These are at best but dreary speculations ; and when 
the poet, in spite of himself, is carried out of them by an 
instinctive belief in individual life beyond the grave, 
instead of that absorption into nature which would be 
annihilation, he rises into that grand strain on the unful- 
filled promise of the genius of Keats : 

" The inheritors of unfulfilled renown 
Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought, 
Far in the unapparent. Chatterton 
Rose pale, his solemn agony had not 
Yet faded from him Sidney as he fought, 
And as he fell, and as he lived, and loved, 
Sublimely mild, a spirit without spot, 
Arose ; and Lucan, by his death approved : 
Oblivion, as they rose, shrank like a thing reproved. 

And many more whose names on earth are dark, 
But whose transmitted effluence cannot die 
So long as fire outlives the parent spark, 
Rose, robed in dazzling immortality. 
'Thou art become as one of us/ they cry, 
1 It was for thee yon kingless sphere has long 
Swung blind in unascended majesty, 
Silent, alone, amid a heaven of song : 
Assume thy winged throne, thou vesper of our throng !' 99 



ELEGIAC POETRY. 



323 



The gloom which envelopes this poem is deepened by 
the impressive anticipation of Shelley's own death, one of 
the most remarkable coincidences to be found in literature. 
It will be remembered that he set sail in his small boat 
from the coast of Genoa, was overtaken at some distance 
from shore by a Mediterranean thunder-storm, and 
ingulfed in the deep waters : they who had watched the 
little skin 7 from the shore, saw it disappear in the dark- 
ness of the storm that struck it, and when the storm 
cleared away, it was seen no more. The lament over 
Keats — " Adonais" as Shelley styled him — written about 
two years before, ended with this stanza — 

u The breath whose might I have invoked in song, 
Descends on me ; my spirit's bark is driven 
Par from the shore, far from the trembling throng, 
"Whose sails were never to the tempest given; 
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven ! 
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar ; 
While burning through the inmost veil of heaven, 
The soul of Adonais, like a star, 
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are." 

The poem, or rather series of poems, of Mr. Tennyson 
is, however, in all respects the most important contribution 
which has yet been given to this department of poetry; 
and I regret that I have left me but a very little space for 
a few words on the character of the book. It is no prompt 
and passionate poetic utterance of grief ) but has a higher 
authority on account of the reserve of near twenty years 
which distinguishes it. Young Hallam, the son of the 
historian, to whose memory the work is a tribute, died in 
1833, at a distance from home— (in the poet's own words : ) 

" In Vienna's fatal walls 
God's finger touched him, and he slept;" 



S24 



LECTURE TENTH. 



and it was not until 1850 that the poet made the world 
a sharer in these imaginings, composed at various inter- 
vals, and expressive of a profound and thoughtful sorrow, 
modified by sea-sons and by time. The volume must be 
a sealed book to all who allow themselves to think of poe- 
try as words to be lightly or indolently read, or as a mere 
effusion of effeminate sentimentalism : it demands not 
only study, but reflection on the reader's own inmost 
being. To such, and to repeated reading, the wisdom and 
beauty of the work disclose themselves ; and in this lies 
one of the proofs of genius in it, for the poet is treating 
?ione of the merely superficial sentiments, but the more 
profound emotions and the most mysterious meditations, 
with which the soul of man strives to preserve communion 
with those who have passed behind the veil that hides the 
dead from the living. It is an effort made in no vain 
curiosity; there is no irrational and immoral dallying with 
grief, no wandering away from the light of divine truth, 
in chase of the false fires of human speculations. The 
poet clings to the memory of his dead friend, with a high- 
souled loyalty, holding it as an ever-present possession of 
good : 

" This truth came borne with bier and pall, 
I felt it when I sorrowed most, 
'Tis better to have loved and lost 
Than never to have loved at all." 

It is grief cherished, not for griefs sake — -that were un- 
manly, irrational, weak, and wicked — but for its highest 
moral uses, a spiritual companionship that lifts him who 
is true to it above all ignoble thoughts and passions, and 
makes him truer to himself and to his God, by deepening 
and expanding his *sense of immortal life. Here is a mi- 



ELEGIAC POETRY. 



325 



nistry of good foi every human being who knows a single 
grave that holds the earthly part of one that ever was 
dear to his eyes ; and thus the poet expounds the chastening 
power of sorrow : 

" How pure at heart, and sound in head, 
With what divine affections bold, 
Should be the man whose thought would hold 
An hour's communion with the dead ! 

In vain shalt thou, or any, call 
The spirits from their golden day, 
Except, like them, thou too canst say, 

My spirit is at peace with all. 

They haunt the silence of the breast, 

Imaginations calm and fair, 

The memory, like a cloudless air, 
The conscience as a sea at rest. 

But when the heart is full of din, 

And doubt beside the portal waits, 

They can but listen at the gates, 
And hear the household jar within." 

It was said by Jeremy Taylor of one of the early 
/athers, that there were some passages in his writings 
which a lamb might ford, and others which an elephant 
could not swim. In this volume of poems there are 
pieces which are the lucid expression of thought or feel- 
ing, common to many a mind, but uncommon in the 
exquisite utterance : there are other passages dim and 
even dark, for they tell of a great poetic imagination look- 
ing into very deep places. Nowhere is this more so, than 
in that series of stanzas in which he describes the home- 
ward voyage of the ship from the Danube to the Severn 
freighted with his friend's lifeless remains. 

How wonderfully expressive are they of that complex 

V 28 



326 LECTURE TENTH. 

v 

and confused state of thought and feeling toward the dead 
while they are yet within the reach of a tender care and 
of a sacred duty ! The first of this series speaks of the dead 
as of the sleeping, and tenderly solicits the quiet guardian- 
ship of the ship, and the ocean, sky, and elements : 

" Fair ship, that from the Italian shore 
Sailest the placid ocean-plains 
"With my lost Arthur's loved remains, 
Spread thy full wings, and waft him o'er. 

* * * * * 

Sphere all your lights around, above ; 

Sleep, gentle heavens, before the prow; 

Sleep, gentle winds, as he sleeps now, 
My friend, the brother of my love." 

***** 

The voyage brings to the poet's earnest imagination the 
dread of dismal burial in the sea, what he elsewhere speaks 
of in allusion to the sailor's funeral in that remarkable 
line, 

" His heavy-shotted hammock shrond 
Drops in his vast and wandering grave." 

The u vast and wandering grave" seems more fearful than 
the u narrow house" that moves only with the earth's mo* 
tion ; and is quiet in the churchyard or in the chancel.* 

"I hear the noise about thy keel; 

I hear the bell struck in the night; 
I see the cabin-window bright; 
I see the sailor at the wheel. 

Thou bringest the sailor to his wife, 
And travelled men from foreign lands ; 
And letters unto trembling hands ; 

And thy dark freight, a vanished life. 

* And he who tnus wrote, " the friend, the brother of my love," 
found his "vast and wandering grave" in the Atlantic. W. B. R. 



ELEGIAC POETRY. 



So bring him : we have idle dreams ; 

This look of quiet flatters thus 

Our home-bred fancies : oh, to us, 
The fools of habit, sweeter seems 

To rest beneath the clover sod, 
That takes the sunshine and the rains, 
Or where the kneeling hamlet drains 

The chalice of the grapes of God ; 

Than if with thee the roaring wells 
Should gulf him fathom deep in brine ; 
And hands so often clasped in mine, 

Should toss with tangle and with shells." 

When the ship has given up her trust, the poet's last 
thought of her follows her with thankfulness and benedic- 
tion : 

" Henceforth, wherever thou mayst roam, 
My blessing, like a line of light, 
Is on the waters day and night, 
And like a beacon, guards thee home. 

So may whatever tempest mars 

Mid ocean, spare thee, sacred bark ; 

And balmy drops in summer dark 
Slide from the bosom of the stars ; 

So kind an office hath been done, 
Such precious relics brought by thee ,* 
The dust of him I shall not see 

Till all my widowed race be run." 

After the unconscious and sacred freight is placed upon 
the land again — the devouring ocean having done gentle 
service of restoration — the poet's heart is almost exultant : 

"'Tis well, 'tis something, we may stand 
Where he in English earth is laid, 
And from his ashes may be made 
The violet of his native land. 



328 



LECTURE TENTH. 



'Tis little ; but it looks in truth 

As if the quiet bones were blest 

Among familiar names to rest, 
And in the places of his youth. 

Come then, pure hands, and bear the head 
That sleeps, or wears the mask of sleep, 
And come, whatever loves to weep, 

And hear the ritual of the dead." 

In this instance, the first period of grief was, by the pecu- 
liar circumstances, protracted much beyond the common 
duration; and thus there was delayed for a while that 
second period — which lasts through the mourner's life — 
when the separation is consummated by the grave. The 
sharp agony or the dull anguish which follows, is coupled 
perhaps, first, with the memories that are prompted by 
local association, the familiar places that are darkened by 
the shadow. These feelings have their record in the 
volume, but perhaps even more expressively in some 
stanzas not contained in it, and different in metre, but 
obviously belonging to the same subject, written perhaps 
on the heights of the Bristol Channel : 

"Break, break, break 

On thy cold gray stones, sea ! 
And I would that my tongue could utter 
The thoughts that arise in me. 

Oh well for the fisherman's boy, 

That he shouts with his sister at play ! 

Oh well for the sailor lad, 

That he sings in his boat on the bay ! 

And the stately ships go on 

To their haven under the hill ; 
But oh for the touch of a vanish' d hand, 

And the sound of a voice that is still ! 



ELEGIAC POETRY. 



829 



JBreak, break, break 

At the foot of thy crags, sea ! 
But the tender grace of a day that is dead 

Will never come back to me." 

If local association can thus quicken the pangs of sorrow 
there is also a ministry of nature soothing them, a salu 
tary influence working either in sympathy or in consola- 
tion, so that the heart takes strength from either the 
tumult or the tranquillity of earth and sky. These are 
processes of which it belongs especially to the poet, as 
moralist and philosopher, to give the exposition. This 
poem shows the mind in its various moods in unison with 
the various moods of nature, calm and stormy; but 
throughout all such changes, the deep, unalterable sorrow 
is asserted when it is asked — 

" What words are these have fallen from me ? 
Can calm despair and wild unrest 
Be tenants of a single breast, 
Or sorrow such a changeling be ? 

Or doth she only seem to take 

The touch of change in calm or storm; 
But knows no more of transient form 

In her deep self, than some dead lake 

That holds the shadow of a lark 
Hung in the shadow of a heaven?" 

^ i$» 

This action and reaction between nature and the heart, as 
influenced through the imagination, is shown (to take an 
illustration from another poet) in those stanzas of Words- 
worth, composed during an evening walk after a stormy 
day, when the public mind was agitated by the news of 
the approaching death of a favourite statesman : 

28* 



830 LECTURE TENTH. 



"Loud is the vale ! the voice is up 
With which she speaks when storms are gone, 
A mighty unison of streams, 
Of all her voices, one ! 

Loud is the vale ; this inland depth 
In peace is roaring like the sea ; 
Yon star upon the mountain-top 
Is listening quietly. 

Sad was I, even to pain deprest, 
Importunate and heavy load ! 
The comforter hath found me here, 
Upon this lonely road." 

Thus did the tranquillity of the star shining in the 
peaceful heavens sink down into the human heart. 

To return to Mr. Tennyson's volume, let me advert to 
its truthfulness in another respect. There is a trial to 
which Christian sorrow is subjected from which, I believe, 
the heathen heart in ancient times must have been in 
some measure free. The pagan faith could at best teach 
only the immortality of the soul, but it made no attrac- 
tions for the place of repose of the lifeless body ; and all 
the skill and pains bestowed by Egyptian art, or in the 
Roman sarcophagus, seem to be no more than a blind 
obedience to some natural instincts. But one great truth 
of the Christian creed, lifting the mind above mere 
instincts to an assured ground of belief, teaches that the 
body too shall have its portion in the hereafter. Pagan 
belief, simpler in its error, could follow, obscurely indeed, 
the disembodied spirit ; while the Christian mind, happier 
in its truth, is often perplexed between thoughts that 
travel to the body's home, and thoughts that would fain 
soar to the spirit's home. 

It would, I believe, be asserting not too much to say, 



ELEGIAC POETRY. 



331 



that the mind of the author of u In Memoriam" must 
have passed through a perturbed spiritual condition, 
passed through it thoughtfully and triumphantly, to give 
to other minds guidance through the same perplexity. 
One of the most pitiable conditions to which that per- 
plexity sometimes leads, is the morbid and materialized 
state of mind which clings in all its thoughts to the visible 
burial-place. You remember that deplorable example of 
the Spanish princess, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isa- 
bella, the mother of Charles the Fifth, the half-crazed 
Joanna, and the frenzied infatuation with which she clung 
for years to the mouldering remains of her husband. 
It is as one of the morbid moods of a perturbed soul that 
Shakspeare represents Hamlet questioning the grave- 
digger's technical knowledge, and handling the skull of 
Yorick. On the other hand, it was a genuine and wise 
and dutiful feeling which was expressed by Lady Russel ? 
the widow of him who had died cruelly on the scaffold- 
" When," said she, " I have done (my) duty to my best 
friend, and (to my children,) how gladly would I lie 
down by that beloved dust I lately went to visit, (that is, 
the case that holds it.) It is a satisfaction to me you did 
not disapprove of what I did, as some do, that it seems 
have heard of it, though I never mentioned it to any 
beside yourself. I had considered I went not to seek 
the living among the dead ; I knew I should not see him 
any more wherever I went, and had made a covenant with 
myself not to break out in unreasonable, fruitless passion, 
but quicken my contemplation whither the nobler part 
was fled, to a country afar off, where no earthly power 
bears any sway, nor can put an end to a happy society." 
One expression of this noble-minded lady shows au 



832 



LECTURE TENTH. 



assumption very common in deciding that it is to "a 

country afar off" that the spirit has departed. As a 

mode of expressing the sense of separation it is natural, 

but in other respects it is without authority, and too often 

tends to a thought of utter annihilation in death. One 

of the great English divines says, " Little know we, how 

little away a soul hath to go to heaven, when it departs from 

the body ; whether it must pass locally through moon, sun, 

and firmament, (and, if all that must be done, it may be done 

• n less time than I have proposed the doubt in,) or whether 

that soul find new light in the same room, and be not 

carried into any other, but that the glory of heaven be 

diffused over all, I know not, I dispute not, I inquire 

not."* It is a belief which imaginative wisdom asserts 

in poetry, that after the material presence has passed 

away from sight and hearing, there may be a spiritual 

presence nearer, closer, and more real. The popular and 

vulgar belief in the gross fictions of ghosts and phantoms 

is perhaps an attestation of truth distorted, f Southey, in 

one of his prose works, said that the most entire constancy 

to the memory of the dead can be found only where there 

is the union of a strong imagination and a strong heart, 

and in his ode to the memory of Bishop Heber — 

" Heber, thou art not dead, thou canst not die ! 
Nor can I think of thee as lost, 



* Donne's Sermons, vol. ii. p. 400. 

f It is a pity, it seems to me, that the -word "ghost" has become so 
perverted and debased from its high and pure spiritual meaning, for 
in common speech it signifies the fantastic notion of an immaterialism 
something sensualized, for if impalpable yet visible, too refined for 
one sense, but gross enough for another, and therefore belonging to 
sense, and not to spirit. Thus it is that truth first is materialized and 
abused, and then wholly denied. H. K. 



ELEGIAC POETRY. 



333 



A little portion of this little isle 
At first divided us ; then half the globe : 
The same earth held us still; but when, 
Keginaldj wert thou so near as now ; 
'Tis but the falling of a withered leaf, 

The breaking of a shell, 

The rending of a veil V 

And Wordsworth, in one of his elegies, boldly pro 
claims : 

" Thou takest not away, Death ! 
Thou strikest, absence perisheth, 

Indifference is no more ; 
The future brightens on our sight ; 
For on the past hath fallen a light, 
That tempts us to adore." 

I have apparently stepped aside from my subject in 
citing these authorities, but the truth they sanction is set 
forth in this poem in the manifold forms into which the 
poet's genius has fashioned it, showing how that spiritual 
presence has been a reality to him, helping him onward 
in the destiny of life. The manly loyalty of his sorrow 
never fails him, but, conscious of the wisdom which sor- 
row brings, he clings to it with gratitude. 

The deep mystery that wraps the whole subject of the 
relation between the living and the dead is in most minds 
barren of all belief; and, often worse than mere negative 
unbelief, it boldly denies that which lies much farther 
beyond the reach of denial than of assertion : that any 
influence of the spirits of the departed upon the spirits of 
the living is possible, and so covenant with the dead is 
boldly broken. One of the most learned and logical theo- 
logians among English laymen, in the present century, 
the late Alexander Knox, said that there was no opinion 
on which his mind rested with stronger assurance than 



LECTURE TENTH. 



that the spirits of the departed have a larger knowledge 
of transactions on earth than they had in life ; and that 
having lost his father at twelve years of age, he felt, after 
the lapse of half a century, that all his days had been 
overshadowed by paternal solicitude. These opinions 
occur in an argument to prove the concern felt by departed 
spirits for those left behind, and I refer to it because it 
shows one of the prime truths of this poem reached by 
another path, the process of strict argumentation.* 

The study of u In Memoriam" will also show how it vin- 
dicates other truths affecting the life and destiny of man — 
elemental truths which have been assailed by some of the 
philosophical heresies of the day ; and, indeed, there is to 
my mind something sublime in the poet's strong affection 
to his friend, passed from mortal sight, having power to 
sweep these heresies away. The notion, coupled perhaps 
with pantheism, which would deny individuality of exist- 
ence in the hereafter, is dissipated by the assurance which 
affection gives — the feeling that it 

" Is faith as vague as all unsweet : 
Eternal form shall still divide 
The eternal soul from all beside, 
And I shall know him when we meet." 

Sombre as the poem at first appears, it works its way on 
to happy hopes — the confidence of future recognitions, and 
a cheerful faith. 

The poet's voice is heard, too, against another error of 
the times — that which would give intellect supremacy over 
the higher powers which are in the soul, confounding 
knowledge with wisdom, or even making wisdom the sub- 



* Alexander Knox's Remains, vol. ii. 



ELEGIAC POETRY. 



335 



ordinate. The better truth comes from the memory and 
imaginative contemplation of the character of his friend, 
when, speaking of knowledge falsely elevated ; he says — 

" Half grown as yet, a child and vain, — 
She cannot fight the fear of death : 
What is she, cut from love and faith, 
But some wild Pallas from the brain 

Of demons ? fiery-hot to burst 
All barriers in her onward race 
For power. Let her know her place ; 

She is the second, not the first. 

A higher hand must make her mild, 
If all be not in vain ; and guide 
Her footsteps, moving side by side 

With wisdom, like the younger child : 

For she is earthly of the mind, 

But wisdom heavenly of the soul. 

friend, who earnest to thy goal 
So early, leaving me behind, 

I would the great world grew like thee, 
Who grewest not alone in power 
And knowledge, but from hour to hour 

In reverence and in charity." 

The effect of a sorrow not weakly indulged, but at once 
faithfully cherished and wisely disciplined, is perhaps 
most comprehensively shown in those stanzas which 
affirm the need, for the highest purposes of sorrow, of 
health and strength, in all that makes up our moral being. 

In concluding this lecture, let me say that I have made 
no attempt to make choice among the poems with a view 
to present effect, but rather, in this desultory way, to illus- 
trate the general purpose and character of the work, and 
gome of the principles involved in it. I have thus passed 



336 



LECTURE TENTH. 



in silence by many of the most admirable pieces in the 
volume, and have not stopped to speak of the superior me- 
trical art which pervades the verse. Indeed, I am well 
aware, that in many respects this is rude handling of a 
poem which peculiarly demands the meditative study of 
silent reading. It is then that you may hear and see this 
stream of song and of sorrow — at first flowing deeply but 
darkly, contending alike against its own force and against 
resistance, light from the sky breaking only fitfully through 
the gloom : you may follow it after a while, gathering its 
strength into a more placid channel, and you will behold 
it at the last flowing as deeply as at first, but calmly, and 
in the light of peaceful memories and tranquil hopes, and 
bearing in the bosom of its own deep tranquillity the re- 
flection of the deep tranquillity of the heavens. 



LECTUEE XL 



^iterator* tf Wit uvb §xtmmx* 

Subtilty of these emotions — Sydney Smith and Leigh Hunt — Dullness of 
jest-books — Hudibras a tedious book — Sydney Smith's idea of the 
study of wit — Charles Lamb — Incapacity for a jest — German note on 
Knickerbocker — Stoicism and Puritanism — Guesses at Truth— Cheer- 
ful literature needed for thoughtful minds — Recreative power of 
books — Different modes of mental relaxation — Napoleon — Shelley— 
Cowper — Southey's merriness — Doctor Arnold — Shakspeare and 
Scott's humour — The Antiquary — Burke — Barrow's definition of wit 
— Hobbes — Forms of Humour — Doctor Johnson's grotesque defi- 
nitions — Collins, the landscape painter — Examples of grotesque style 
— Irish Bulls — Rip Van Winkle — Sydney Smith and Doctor Parr — 
Humour in old tragedies — Lear and the fool — Hamlet and the grave- 
digger — Irony — Macbeth and the doctor — Anne Boleyn — Bishop 
Latimer — Fuller — Dean Swift and Arbuthnot — Gulliver — Sir Roger 
De Coverley — Charles Lamb — Swift and Byron's humour — Prosti- 
tution of wit — Sir Robert Walpole — Lord Melbourne — Hogarth — 
Danger of power of humour illustrated — Ruskin's criticism. 

In my last lecture I was engaged in the consideration 
ti some very serious subjects, the gravest that belong to 
literature. In passing from them at once to the Litera- 
ture of Wit and Humour, I have less apprehension of the 
transition being felt as a violent one than that there will 
be found in this lecture more of seriousness than the chief 
title of it might lead one to expect. The movements of 
the mind which are connected with the faculties styled 
" Wit" and " Humour/' are among the most subtile of 



* University of Pennsylvania, March 13, 1851. 

29 337 



338 



LECTURE ELEVENTH. 



which the mind is capable, are, for the most part, difficult 
of description, and demand an acute and delicate ana- 
lysis. In contrast with my last lecture, I am anxious at 
the outset to give you the assurance of a promise that I 
shall this evening make a more reasonable demand upon 
your time and thoughts, for the light artillery which I 
have now to do with can be more expeditiously manoeuvred 
than the heavy ordnance to which I had to stand on 
the former occasion. 

It is well that it should be understood between us that 
the subject of Wit and Humour does not at all imply that 
the treatment of it should be identical with the effects of 
those powers; on the contrary, by raising such expectation 
and not fulfilling it, the subject may, in reality, prove 
more serious than even a grave subject, wherewith such 
anticipations could not be associated. Though I am 
usually averse to adverting in any way to the difficulty of 
any subject on which I have undertaken to lecture, indulge 
me in saying that the subject of the literature of Wit and 
Humour is one for which there is peculiarly demanded, 
not only a genial and cultivated capacity to enjoy such 
literature, but a skill and tact in the handling of it; the 
importance of which I am so well aware of, that it is with 
no small misgiving that I have ventured upon the subject. 
When the late Sydney Smith, the most distinguished wit 
of contemporary literature, in a course of lectures on 
Moral Philosophy, discussed these faculties of Wit and 
Humour, the subject, though manifestly not an unconge- 
nial one to him, becomes even in his hands, a somewhat se- 
date disquisition. When Leigh Hunt wrote his volume on 
" The Poetry of Wit and Humour," vivacious and plea- 
sant and facetious as he has often shown himself in other 



LITERATURE OF WIT AND HUMOUR. 



839 



productions, in this we find less of that sprightliness 
which once made sunshine for him within prison walls. 

But when one comes to reflect upon it, it is not sur- 
prising that a subject of this kind should assume what 
appears to be an unwonted and inapposite seriousness, 
when it is taken out of its life of activity, and made a mat- 
ter of speculation. Everybody knows what a dull process 
it is to explain a piece of wit. 

"A jest's prosperity lies in the ear 
Of him that hears it, never in the tongue 
Of him that makes it;"* 

and much graver than explanation is the work of analysis. 
It is a cruel business to anatomize the creatures of wit or 
humour, to place them on the metaphysical dissec ting- 
table, and there to lay bare the hidden places of their 
power; and it demands, too, for this serious service the 
most acute intellectual scalpel which the metaphysician 
can handle. 

This also is to be considered, that not only does a jest's 
prosperity lie in the ear of him that hears it, but it has 
its life in an atmosphere of its own; it springs up from a 
soil of its own; and there are few plants so tender in the 
transplanting. A happy, well-timed, well-applied piece 
of wit, which would electrify a House of Commons, becomes 
tame and vapid when removed by repetition out of its 
own sustaining atmosphere : one proof of this may be 
observed in the fact that there are few duller books than 
what are called u jest-books," whether the collection be 
made by Hierocles or by Joe Miller, (who is, I believe, 
not an apocryphal person,) or by the capacious intellect 



* Love's Labour's Lost. 



340 



LECTURE ELEVENTH. 



of Lord Bacon. They are not only very lifeless reading, 
but are regarded with a degree of contempt, which almost 
denies them admission into a nation's literature, even with 
the authority of the name of the philosophic Lord Chan- 
cellor pleading for entrance.* The same cause makes it, 
to a certain degree, a difficult and delicate task to present 
illustrations of this subject, for even without subjecting 
them to the torture of analysis, they must, although syn- 
thetically considered, be detached from their context, 
separated from all that was preparatory of their reception, 
and upon which their welcome is so dependent. The 
magic of wit and humour will be found very often to be 
so intimately connected with other intellectual action and 
other states of feeling, that all effect is destroyed by the 
attempt to separate it ; a dull, heavy residuum is left, and 
all the delicate, volatile spirit is evaporated away. It will 
be one of my purposes in this lecture, to show the har- 
monious connection of the faculties of wit and humour 
with states of mind and of feeling with which we do not 
ordinarily associate them. 

Assuming, as we are entitled to do, that that alone is 
genuine literature which contributes in some way to 
fashion the reader's character, to give both strength and 
guidance to his thoughts and feelings, books which abound 

* There are, I believe, few more tedious books in the language than 
Butler's Hudibras ,* the perpetual and sustained effort at wit becomes 
oppressive, and it can be read only, I am disposed to think, in small 
quantities- It has been not unfrequentl y said, in Shakspearian criticism, 
that the gayest and one of the bitterest characters, Mercutio, is put 
out of the way in the third act, not because the poet's fund of inven- 
tive wit was exhausted, (that could not be with him who carried Fal- 
staff through three dramas,) but the continuance of Mercutio's vivacity 
would have been inapposite. H. H. 



LITERATURE OP WIT AND HUMOUR. 



343 



with wit or humour are entitled to take a place in a 
nation's literature, only so far as they subserve the same 
ends. As in one of my lectures I spoke of the error of 
attempting to draw too precise a boundary line around 
sacred literature, making it too much a thing standing 
apart, so, in regard to the literature of wit and humour. 
I shall be sorry if such a title, which I have been obliged 
to use, led any one to think of it as of a more distinctive 
existence than is the case, instead of regarding those facul- 
ties as pervading the literature in various degrees, and 
thus forming some of the elements of its life. I shall 
have occasion to trace these elements in close contact with 
elements of tragedy, and to show how the processes which 
we generalize under the names of wit and humour are kin- 
dred with the most intense passion and with the deepest 
feeling. Our English literature shows, I think most con- 
clusively, in ways that are respectively example and warn- 
ing, that these faculties are strongest and healthiest when 
they exist and are cultivated in just proportion with other 
faculties and feelings, without gaining a predominance or 
pre-eminence, which makes them perilous to him in whom 
they thus get the mastery, and formidable to others. The 
best books in the language prove the power and the beauty 
of this harmony and proportion of the faculties ; the lite- 
rature should serve as an agency of discipline to produce 
in readers a like well-balanced, well-proportioned condition 
of the mind, and in the literature of wit and humour we 
are to find help for the cultivation of those powers. 

Sydney Smith said, " It is imagined that wit is a sort 
of inexplicable visitation, that it comes and goes with the 
rapidity of lightning, and that it is quite as unattainable 
as beauty or just proportion. I am so much of a contrary 
W ^ 29* 

^ ■ 



o42 



LECTURE ELEVENTH. 



way of thinking, that I am convinced a man might sit 
down as systematically and as successfully to the study of 
wit as he might to the study of mathematics ; and I 
would answer for it, that, by giving up only six hours a 
day to being witty, he should come on prodigiously before 
Midsummer, so that his friends should hardly know him 
again. For what is there to hinder the mind from gra- 
dually acquiring a habit of attending to the lighter rela- 
tions of ideas in which wit consists ?"* Now this is 
obviously the exaggeration of one who, in the triumphant 
consciousness of his own endowment, pictures the per- 
plexity of a student of wit coming to his task as he would 
to the differential calculus, giving only six hours a day to 
it, and astonishing his friends by Midsummer with his 
progress. But if this is witty exaggeration, so far as 
creative power is concerned, it covers a truth with respect 
to the culture of a susceptibility to the productions of 
wit and humour; and that susceptibility may fairly be 
considered as a constituent of every vigorous and well-cul- 
tivated mind — undoubtedly so, when the full extent of the 
operations of wit and humour is justly appreciated. 

In such culture, whether by literature or otherwise, 
there will of course be found the same disparity of natural 
endowment of those as of other faculties. As there are 
unimaginative intellects to which all poetry is a sealed 
mystery, so are there others which are impenetrable to all 
the influences of wit and humour, and this is owing not 
so much to any exclusive predominance of seriousness as 
to that of dulness. It was in this respect that Charles 
Lamb, in his Essay on u Imperfect Sympathies," com- 



* Sketches on Moral Philosophy, Lecture x. p. 125, Am. edition. 



LITERATURE OF WIT AND HUMOUR. 



84? 



plained of his inability to like a certain description of 
Scotchmen — that dry, literal phase of intellect, which is so 
alien to all poetic or humorous liberty of language. u I 
was present/ 9 writes Lamb, " not long since, at a party 
of North Britons, where a son of Burns was expected; 
and happened to drop a silly expression (in my South 
British way) that I wished it were the father instead of 
the son, when four of them started up at once to inform 
me that ( that was impossible, because he was dead/ 
An impracticable wish, it seems, was more than they 
could conceive." This character of mind (so different, I 
may remark from the genial Scotch humour of Burns, or 
Walter Scott, or John Wilson) is not peculiar to Scot- 
land, but every one can probably find specimens of it in 
the range of his own acquaintance. 

The most remarkable instance of obtuseness to light 
letters that I ever met with occurred in another region. 
Goeller, a German editor of Thucydides, in annotating a 
passage of the Greek historian, describing the violence of 
the Athenian factions, gives two modern illustrations : one 
of the Guelf and Ghibelline parties in Italy ; the other — he 
cites Washington Irving and his book very gravely in 
Latin — the factions of long pipes and short pipes in New 
York, under the administration of Peter Stuyvesant, 
Imagine this erudite and ponderous German poring over 
Knickerbocker as seriously as over Guicciardini's History 
of the Italian Republics !* 



* This instance of simplicity has a most grotesque effect in the ori- 
ginal, printed at Leipsic in 1836. It literally reads thus : " Addo locum 
Washingtonis Irwingii, Hist. ~Novi Eboraci. lib. vii. cap. v." — " The old 
factions of Long Pipes and Short Pipes, strangled by the Herculean 
grasp of P. Stuyvesant." W. B. R. 



344 



LECTURE ELEVENTH. 



But the genial mind is accessible, at least, to some one 
or other of the manifold influences which are very inade- 
quately expressed by these two general names, " Wit" 
and " Humour." They do but describe an inventive 
energy of genius, which assumes a vast variety of expres- 
sion, ranging from the most acute intellectual wit, through 
the many forms of humour, down to frolic drollery and 
mere fun and the broadest buffoonery. If it be asked what 
claim to culture this class of faculties has, the. first and 
simplest answer is, that they are among the talents with 
which man is gifted — the gift bringing along with it the 
necessity and the duty of culture : they are powers which 
will run riot and run to mischief, unless guided and dis- 
ciplined. They cannot be destroyed by being disowned. 
It was a wretched delusion when Stoicism strove to stiffen 
humanity into stone : and so, in later days, there was like 
wrong when Puritanism looked black upon natural, inno- 
cent, healthful cheerfulness, frighting the joyous temper 
of a people with a frown, which I believe to this day 
haunts the race both in Britain and in America, to an 
extent which is irrational, unchristian, and of course in- 
jurious, by abandoning what is festive to the world's 
keeping, instead of retaining them under better and safer 
influences. It was Wesley, I believe, who said he had 
no idea of allowing the devil to monopolize all the good 
tunes; and it is certain that that same personage (I 
don't mean Wesley) will be ready enough to furnish to 
the needs of men holydays of his contriving, if no other 
provision be made for what is a natural and lawful craving 
of toiling humanity. There will be, too, a literature of 
wicked wit to fascinate and poison men, unless that of a 
truthful and healthful kind be cultivated. It is ; I believe, 



LITERATURE OF WIT AND HUMOUR. 



345 



not an uncommon inclination, to disown and to disparage 
that literature which is an agency of pleasant thoughts ; and 
in opposing to such an opinion a few serious authorities, 
I hope you will not apprehend an inappropriate relapse 
into the grave subjects of my last lecture. A great divine, 
preaching at a time when Puritan rigour was beginning 
to make itself felt, said, " Fear not thou, that a cheerful- 
ness and alacrity in using God's blessings — fear not thou, 
that a moderate delight in music, in conversation, in 
recreations, shall be imputed to thee for a fault, for it is 
conceived by the Holy Ghost, and is the offspring of a 
peaceful conscience and another who lived to see and 
to suffer by the new severity, Jeremy Taylor, said, " It is 
certain that all that which can innocently make a man 
cheerful, does also make him charitable, for grief, and age, 
and sickness, and weariness, these are peevish and trouble- 
some ; but mirth and cheerfulness are content, and civil, 
and compliant, and communicative, and love to do good, 
and to swell up to felicity only upon the wings of charity. 
, ... If a facete discourse, and an amicable, friendly 
mirth can refresh the spirit, and take it off from the vile 
temptation of peevish, despairing, uncomplying melan- 
choly, it must needs be innocent and commendable. And 
we may as well be refreshed by a clean and brisk dis- 
course, as by the air of Campanian wines ) and our faces 
and our heads may as well be anointed and look pleasant 
with wit and friendly intercourse, as with the fat of the 
balsam-tree." A living divine, speaking not profession- 
ally, but in that agreeable work, the " Guesses at Truth/' 
has said : What a dull, plodding, tramping, clanking would 



* Donne's Works, vol. ii. p. 103. 



346 



LECTURE ELEVENTH. 



the ordinary intercourse of society be ; without wit, to 
enliven and brighten it ! When two men meet, they 
seem to be, as it were, kept at bay through the estranging 
effects of absence, until some sportive sally opens their 
hearts to each other. Nor does any thing spread cheerful- 
ness so rapidly over a whole party, or an assembly of 
people, however large. Reason expands the soul of the 
philosopher. Imagination glorifies the poet, and breathes 
a breath of spring through the young and genial : but if 
we take into account the numberless glances and gleams 
whereby wit lightens our every-clay life, I hardly know 
what power ministers so bountifully to the innocent plea- 
sures of mankind."* 

Another thoughtful essayist of our day has said, " If 
ever a people required to be amused, it is we sad-hearted 
Anglo-Saxons:" (the phrase includes us ever-working 
Americans.) " Heavy eaters," (rapidity must be substi- 
tuted for weight for the Anglo-Saxon on this side the 
ocean,) u hard thinkers, often given up to a peculiar 
melancholy of our own, with a climate that for months 
together would frown away mirth if it could, many of us 
with very gloomy thoughts about our hereafter, — if ever 
there were a people who should avoid increasing their 
dulness by all work and no play, we are that people. 
'They took their pleasures sadly/ says Froissart, e after 
their fashion/ We need not ask of what nation Froissart 
was speaking."f But let me add, that the blood and tem- 
perament of race are not safeguards of contentment, for it is 
with the most vivacious people, Froissart' s countrymen, 
that the perpetration of suicide is most common. 



* Archdeacon Hare's Guesses at Truth, first series, p. 316. 
t Friends in Council, part i. p. 56. 



LITERATURE OE WIT AND HUMOUR. 



3i7 



It is for thoughtful minds that the agency of a cheer- 
ful literature is most needed, for remember that it is 
such minds that are most exposed to morbid moods, 
to despondency, to discontent, to some dull depression, 
more fatal to the energies of the mind, than danger or 
earnest labour, which nerve the spirit to encounter them. 
These are intellectual and moral evils, which must be met 
and mastered by thoughtful self-discipline, and in that 
discipline, the service of literature may be found, if pro- 
perly sought for, providing as it does, in such varied form, 
so much of restorative influence. The good will be 
gained, not so much by seeking it in books especially meant 
for amusement, as in the culture of a capacity to relish wit 
and humour, as they are blended with other influences 
also intended to give strength and health to the mind. 
The recreative power of literature will of course be rela- 
tive to the character and habits of the reader, and happily 
it is as largely varied as they are, thus suiting their vari- 
ous needs. It is stated by Lord Holland in his u Foreign 
Reminiscences," that Napoleon, when he had an hour for 
diversion, not unfrequently employed it in looking over a 
book of logarithms, which he said was at all seasons of 
his life a recreation to him.* It would be curious, and 



* Lord Holland's Foreign Reminiscences, p. 174, Am. ed. I am 
rather sorry to see this volume quoted as authority for any thing ; but 
as it is not matter of defamation, it may be credible. I know nothing 
more painful in political literature than these posthumous effusions 
of Lord Holland, frho was known on this side the Atlantic, thanks very 
much to one of Mr. Macaulay's reviews, as a good-humoured, liberal 
nobleman, in the sunshine of whose hospitality literary men of England 
were wont to congregate — who was a scholar and a gentleman, Theso 
books, published since his death, as well those relating to foreign as 
domestic politics, show him to have been the studious recorder 



348 



LECTUKE ELEVENTH. 



perhaps not unprofitable; to speculate on sucli a process of 
recreation, and trace its relation to the active life which 
was refreshed by it. The poet Shelley is said to have 
been extremely fond of mathematics; and every hard, dry 
science ; and I can well conceive that such fondness may 
be traced to the relief and repose which such subjects 
brought to one whose imagination soared amid the clouds, 
and whose moral creed was filled with wild and wonder 
ing speculations. Another poet, whose genius had wiser 
mastery over his imagination, Wordsworth, in the poetic 
history of his mind, speaking of geometric truths, has said, 

" Mighty is the charm 
Of those abstractions to a mind beset 
With images and haunted by herself; 
And specially delightful unto me 
"Was that clear synthesis built up aloft 
So gracefully 

and the same poet, after describing the agitation of his 
mind in sharing the excitement and depression of a tumul- 
tuous condition of the world, says that he 

" Turned to abstract science, and there sought 
Work for the reasoning faculty enthroned, 
Where the disturbances of space and time, 
Whether in matters various, properties 
Inherent, or from human will and power 
Derived, find no admission." 



malignant gossip of all sorts of people. Credulity, the wicked credu- 
lity that inclines to believe evil of one's kind, is hardly a sufficient apo- 
logy for such a record. For its publication there is none. His enthu- 
siasm (if such it is) for one so selfish and defamat«^ as Napoleon, is, 
in my poor judgment, eminently characteristic. Let me here record my 
wonder how any American man, fond of the institutions, and proud 
of the traditions of his country, can have sympathy with any European 
Bonaparte. W. B. R. 

* The Prelude, book vi. p. 503, and book xi. p. 536. Am. ed. 



LITERATURE OF WIT AND HUMOUR. 



349 



And, in like manner, we may suppose that it was recrea- 
tion for Napoleon to turn away from a world in which 
men by thousands and tens of thousands moved for life 
and death, by his controlling will, and kingdoms shifted 
about " like clouds obedient to his breath" — to turn away 
from such life, and find a brief and happy seclusion in the 
tranquil and enduring truths of abstract science. It may 
be, too, that the book of logarithms brought with it memo- 
ries of early days, before he began to bear the giant bur- 
den of Europe's fortunes, and thus carried him away to 
breathe in spirit the clear atmosphere of studious boyhood. 

I have spoken of this case to show how various and 
relative a thing is recreation, as the game of chess is 
amusement to some minds, while others shrink from it, as 
Sir Walter Scott says he did, as from a toil and a waste 
of brains.* Charles Lamb describes the old lady who 
went so earnestly to her game of whist, that "she could 
not bear to have her noble occupation, to which she wound 
up her faculties, considered in the light of unbending the 
mind after serious studies in recreation. . . . She unbent 
her mind afterwards, over a book."* In like manner, with 
regard to books, their recreative character is greatly modi- 
fied by the disposition of the recipient. Mr. Dickens has 
somewhere a story of a sombre-spirited sentimentalist, who 
pronounced Milton's " L' Allegro" his worst performance, 
and complained of Gray's Elegy as too light and frivolous. 

If the case of Napoleon shows a peculiar recreation con- 
genial to a spirit of the most intense energy, literary his- 
tory tells of such a case as that of Cowper, where the 



* Lockhart's Scott, vol. i. p. 174. 

f Mrs. Battle's Opinions of Whist. Lamb's Prose Works, vol. ii. p. 74 
SO 



S50 LECTURE ELEVENTH. 

hauntings of melancholy were allayed by sportive inven- 
tion. His biographer tells us, that " For a while Lady 
Austen's conversation had as happy an effect upon the 
melancholy spirit of Cowper as the harp of David upon 
Saul. Whenever the cloud seemed to be coming over 
him, her sprightly powers were exerted to dispel it. One 
afternoon, when he appeared more than usually depressed, 
she told him the story of John Gilpin, which had been 
told to her in her childhood, and which, in her relation 
tickled his fancy as much as it has that of thousands and 
tens of thousands since in his. The next morning, he 
said to her that he had been kept awake during the 
greater part of the night by thinking of the story and 
laughing at it, and that he had turned it into a ballad. 
The ballad was sent to Mr. Unwin, who said in reply that 
it had made him laugh tears. Cowper himself said in 
one of his letters : c If I trifle, and merely trifle, it is 
because I am reduced to it by necessity ; a melancholy, 
that nothing else so effectually disperses, engages me 
sometimes in the arduous task of being merry by force. 
And, strange as it may seem, the most ludicrous lines I 
ever wrote have been written in the saddest mood, and but 
for that saddest mood, perhaps, had never been written at 
all/"* 

But it is not only for their recreative agency that the 
faculties of wit and humour are to be considered; they are 
also to be regarded as elements of genius, as entering into 
the constitution of the highest order of the human mind. 
I do not, of course, mean that every man eminent in the 
world of letters or of action is a wit or a humourist ; but 



* Sou^iiey's Cowper, vol. ii. p. 74. 



LITERATURE OF WIT AND HUMOUR. 



351 



that there is abundant proof, either in acts or written 
words, of the presence of these faculties, made more or less 
manifest, according to the tenor of the life or the subject 
of the writings, and not unfrequently breaking forth 
through adverse circumstances of life or unpropitious 
topics of books. When Dr. Arnold is describing the great 
Carthaginian hero putting on a variety of disguises to 
baffle the attempts of assassins, he says : Hannibal u wore 
false hair, appearing sometimes as a man of mature years, 
and sometimes with the grey hair of old age ; and if he 
had that taste for humour which great men are seldom 
luithout, and which some anecdotes of him imply, he must 
have been often amused by the mistakes thus occasioned, 
and have derived entertainment from that which policy or 
necessity dictated."* A thoughtful and eloquent defender 
of Luther, in excusing the plainness, and even coarseness, 
of expression for which he has been reproached, says, 
"he could not mince his words, or take thought about 
suiting them to fastidious ears, even if there had been 
such to suit them to ; and the humour with which he was 
so richly gifted, and which is the natural associate of an 
intense love of truth, if it be not rather a particular form 
and manifestation of that love, led him to strip off the 
artificial drapery and conventional formalities of life, and 
to look straight at the realities hidden beneath them in 
their naked contrasts and contradictions." I quote the 
passage simply as an authority for considering humour as 
a u natural associate of an intense love of truth, perhaps 
rather a particular form and manifestation of that love," 
and thus explaining, at least in part, how it enters into the 



* History of Koine, vol. iii. p. 102. 



S52 



LECTURE ELEVENTH. 



constitution of genius. Observe, too, that it is the strong- 
est and most capacious mind which will perceive most 
keenly and feel most deeply the manifold and perpetually 
occurring contradictions, and incongruities, and inconsist- 
encies of life, the slight steppings down from the sublime 
to the ridiculous, the quaint contact of the comic and the 
solemn, provoking the laugh at the wrong time or in the 
wrong place, and all the strange combinations which grow 
out of man's mingled nature of strength and weakness, 
w T hich a thoughtful mind observes in others, and is yet 
more deeply conscious of it in itself. These . things are 
the themes of wit and humour. There is another order 
of minds, narrower in its range of observation, and less re- 
flective on its own being, which, dwelling within the covert 
of some hypothesis of its own, shapes the world to its own 
standard, and neither sees nor feels the incongruities of 
humanity. Such is not genius — but a dry, hard, and 
mechanical sort of intellect, and wit and humour are all 
mystery to it. 

The authors who deal most largely with human nature 
are those in whom the elements of wit and humour will be 
most displayed — in connection, however, with serious ele- 
ments. This will be seen especially in those writers whose 
imaginations have produced the greatest number of crea- 
tions — I mean of invented characters — representative of hu- 
manity. In English literature, the three who may, I think, 
be regarded as pre-eminent for the number and life-like 
reality of their creations, are Chaucer, Shakspeare, and 
Scott ; and in their writings may be found the finest spe- 
cimens of genuine humour, coupled, too, with tragic power 
equally admirable. It is remarkable, too, to observe how, 
in an early age, the large imagination of Chaucer blended 



LITERATURE OF WIT AND HUMOUR. 



353 



with the tenderest pathos a humour coarse at times, but 
again as delicate as any of an age of refinement — such as 
his description of the " Sergeant of the Law/' which is 
like a smile of kindly- natured huniour, rather than a stroke 
or a sneer of satire : 

" Discreet he was, and of great reverence 
He seemed such, his words were so wise : 

& % & * # 

Nowhere so busy a man as he there n'as, 
And yet he seemed busier than he was." 

Examples without number of Sir Walter Scott's genial 
humour, as displayed in the personages of his novels, will 
rise up to the thoughts of any one. How beautifully is 
it interwoven with the serious passages in the Antiquary ! 
How it gleams through the clouds of civil war and the 
gloom of Puritan severity in Old Mortality ! and what a 
fine relief does it not give to the deeper tragedy of th6 
Bride of Lammermoor ! In Shakspeare, the whole subject 
might be studied and illustrated through a boundless 
variety of character, from the malevolent and wicked wit 
of Iago, with its serpent-like venom, the inexhaustible 
resources of Falstaff, the morbid humour of J aques, or the 
healthy humour of Falconbridge, and the many other 
phases of these faculties in his men and women. 

These powers may be discovered also in other great 
poets of our language, the subjects or forms of whose 
poems were less favourable to their appearance. The pen- 
sive atmosphere with which the sage and solemn spirit of 
Spenser has enveloped the region of his Faery Land, admits, 
at times, some rays of a quaint humour. In Milton, the 
powers assume so stern an aspect, that one hesitates in as- 
sociating them with wit and humour, and yet, assuredly, 

30* 



854 



LECTURE ELEVENTH. 



such are the faculties, in their most repulsive shape, both 
in his prose writings and his poems, betraying how a grand 
and noble spirit was imbittered by the adverse circum- 
stances of both public and private life. It was eminently 
characteristic for him to speak of " anger and laughter/' 
as " those two most rational faculties of human intellect/' 
and to boast of that " vein of laughing/' which " hath oft- 
times a strong and sinewy force in teaching and confuting/'* 
The presence of these faculties in the greatest English 
prose writers is also susceptible of proof. In the most 
illustrious of the old divines, they appear in a way that is 
not permitted to later theologians — I refer not only to 
such instances as the works of the church historian, 
Thomas Fuller, or the sermons of " the witty Dr. South," 
but also to the humour which is blended with the reason- 
ings of Barrow and the poetic eloquence of Jeremy Tay- 
lor. The wit of Swift is universally recognised as his 
most effective weapon : and in another masculine mind, 
also distempered by disease as Swift's was, there was a 
sort of rough humour, in Dr. Johnson's. The high-toned 
eloquence of Burke, though far from sparkling with 
wit like Sheridan's, was not without its humour : ob- 
serve it, too, in his chief political treatise — the quiet 
humour for example, in the well-known comparison of 
the noisy, factious pamphleteers with solid unloquacious 
English sobriety • " Because half-a-dozen grasshoppers 
under a fern make the field ring with their importunate 
chirp, while tnousands of great cattle reposing beneath the 
shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, 



* Milton's Prose Works. Preface to Animadversions upon the Re. 
monstrants* Defence against Smectymnuus, p. 55. 



LITERATURE OF WIT AND HUMOUR. 855 

pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are 
the only inhabitants of the field ; that, of course, they are 
many in number; or that, after all, they are other than 
the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and 
troublesome, insects of the hour/' 

It is to one of the great divines of the seventeenth cen- 
ury that we owe the most famous description (it at- 
tempts not definition) of Wit : I refer, of course, to that 
passage so often, and yet never too often, quoted in Bar- 
row's sermon " against foolish talking and jesting." It 
was composed at a time when the word " Wif was begin- 
ning to change its original meaning of mental power for 
the more limited sense of later times, and when the faculty 
itself, having the special favour of the " merry monarch" 
was in unwonted, and, it may be added, wanton activity. 
Dr. Barrow said, "To the question what the thing we 
speak of is, or what this facetiousness doth import ? I 
might reply as Democritus did to him that asked the defi- 
nition of a man, 'Tis that which we all see and know: any 
one better apprehends what it is by acquaintance than I 
can inform him by description. It is, indeed, a thing so 
versatile and multiform, appearing in so many shapes, so 
many postures, so many garbs, so variously apprehended 
by several eyes and judgments, that it seemeth no less 
hard to settle a clear and certain notion thereof, than to 
make a portrait of Proteus, or to define the figure of ? 
fleeting air. Sometimes it lieth in a pat allusion to a 
known story, or in seasonable application of a trivial say- 
ing, or in forging an apposite tale : sometimes it pjayeth 
in words and phrases, taking advantage from the ambi- 
guity of their sense or the affinity of their sound : some- 
times it is wrapped in a dress of humorous expression . 



856 



LECTURE ELEVENTH. 



sometimes it lurketh under an odd similitude : sometimes 
it is lodged in a sly question, in a smart answer, in a 
quirkish reason, in a shrewd intimation, in cunningly di- 
verting or cleverly retorting an objection : sometimes it 
is couched in a bold scheme of speech, in a tart irony, in 
a lusty hyperbole, in a startling metaphor, in a plausible 
reconciling of contradictions, or in acute nonsense : some- 
times a scenical representation of persons or things, a 
counterfeit speech, a mimical look or gesture, passeth for 
it: sometimes an affected simplicity, sometimes a pre- 
sumptuous boldness, giveth it being; sometimes it riseth 
from a lucky hitting upon what is strange, sometimes from 
a crafty wresting obvious matter to the purpose; often it 
consisteth in one knows not what, and springeth up one 
can hardly tell how. Its ways are unaccountable and in- 
explicable, being answerable to the numberless rovings of 
fancy and windings of language. It is, in short, a man- 
ner of speaking out of the simple and plain way, (such as 
reasoning teacheth and proveth things by,) which, by a 
pretty surprising uncouthness in conceit or expression, 
doth affect and amuse the fancy, stirring it to some 
wonder and breeding some delight thereto/' 

One cannot read this large induction and analytical 
description of the forms of wit, from the higher inventions 
down to " acute nonsense," without thinking how thought- 
fully this great and learned divine must have observed the 
wits of the times of Charles the Second, and how genially 
he must have received what he so wisely expounded ! Nor 
can I discover that the metaphysicians have been able to 
advance beyond this description to the more precise ground 
of definition. The most acute of the Greek philosophers, 
Aristotle, gave what is at best a negative definition of the 



LITERATURE OF WIT AND HUMOUR. 



35T 



laughable, when he said it depended on what is out of its 
proper time and place, yet without danger or pain. That re- 
markable but wrong-headed English philosopher, Hobbes, 
who thought that war was man's natural state, denned 
laughter to be "a sudden glory arising from a sudden 
conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparisor 
with infirmity of others or our own infirmity/' The defi 
nitions given by Locke and by the Scotch rhetoricians, 
and the analysis made by Coleridge and by Sydney Smith, 
have done little more than trace the effect of wit or hu- 
mour to an agreeable surprise occasioned by an unusual 
connection of thoughts. Still more difficult would it be 
to trace the subtle relations between wit and humour, and 
to analyze that higher form in which both are combined, 
but for which language helps us with no name. Wit may, 
I think, be regarded as a purely intellectual process, while 
humour is a sense of the ridiculous controlled by feeling, 
and coexistent often with the gentlest and deepest pathos, 
visible, it may be, even in those smiles which have been 
finely described, as "a sad heart's sunshine." 

Often the simple sense of incongruity produces the 
effect of the laughable — the unfitness of the means to the 
end, as in some of Dr. Johnson's definitions, where his 
Latinized dialect makes him like the interpreter in Sheri- 
dan's farce, the harder to be understood of the two — his 
definition of " Network — any thing reticulated or decus- 
sated at equal distances, with interstices between the 
intersections," or when, in the preface to his Dictionary, 
in explanation of the difficulty of ranging the meanings of 
a word in order, he asks : " When the radical idea branches 
out into parallel ramifications, how can a consecutive 
series be formed of senses in their nature collateral V' 
X 



358 



LECTURE ELEVENTH. 



Again, when Johnson defines " Excise/' to be lt a hateful 
tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged, not by the 
common judges of property, but wretches hired by those 
to whom excise is paid ;" and Pension, to be "an allow- 
ance made to any one without an equivalent. In England 
it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state- 
hireling for treason to his country" — a comic effect is pro- 
duced by the unexpected encounter with such a fervid 
temper among the dispassionate definitions of a dictionary, 
almost as if one should meet with a spiteful demonstration 
in geometry.* To an ear accustomed to simple English, 
simple in the choice and in the arrangement of the words, 
the highly Latinized and stately sentences of Dr. Johnson 
now make an impression bordering sometimes on the lu- 
dicrous — owing, I think, to the unnatural disparity be- 
tween his style and the ordinary colloquial use of lan- 
guage: this was curiously shown by a practical joke that 
was practised on that worthy and simple-mannered man, 
the late Sir David Wilkie, by a fellow-painter and his 
brother, and described in the Memoir of Collins, the land- 
scape-painter : " Mr. Collins's brother Francis possessed a 
remarkably retentive memory, which he was accustomed 
to use for the amusement of himself and others in the fol- 
lowing manner. He learnt by heart a whole number of 
one of Dr. Johnson's i Ramblers/ and used to occasion 
considerable diversion to those in the secret, by repeating 
it all through to a new company, in a conversational tone, 
as if it was the accidental product of his own fancy, — now 

* It may have been a definition like that of "excise," whicn occa- 
sioned the criticism from a Scotch peasant, whom Sir Walter Scott 
found reading aloud the Dictionary containing the authorities, "that 
they were Draw stones, but unco short." H. R. 



LITERATURE OF WIT AND HUMOUR. 



359 



addressing his flow of moral eloquence to one astonished 
auditor, and now to another. One day, when the two 
brothers were dining at Wilkie's, it was determined to try 
the experiment upon their host. After dinner, accord- 
ingly, Mr. Collins paved the way for the coming speech, 
by leading the conversation imperceptibly to the subject 
of the paper in the ' Rambler/ At the right moment, 
Francis Collins began. As the first grand Johnsonian 
sentences struck upon his ear, (uttered, it should be re- 
membered, in the most elaborately careless and conversa- 
tional manner,) "Wilkie started at the high tone that the 
conversation had suddenly assumed, and looked vainly for 
explanation to his friend Collins, who, on his part, sat with 
his eyes respectfully fixed on his brother, all wrapt attention 
to the eloquence that was dropping from his lips. Once 
or twice, with perfect mimicry of the conversational cha- 
racter he had assumed, Francis Collins hesitated, stam- 
mered, and paused, as if collecting his thronging ideas. 
At one or two of these intervals, Wilkie endeavoured to 
speak, to ask a moment for consideration ; but the torrent 
of his guest's eloquence was not to be delayed . . . until 
at last it reached its destined close; and then Wilkie, 
who, as host, thought it his duty to break silence by the 
first compliment, exclaimed, with the most perfect uncon- 
sciousness of the trick that had been played him, * Ay, 
ay, Mr. Francis ; verra clever — (though I did not under- 
stand it all) — verra clever !' " 

It not unfrequently happens, also, that a sense of the 
ludicrous in style may be traced in a false and florid rhe- 
toric to the incongruous combination of literal and figura- 
tive forms of expression. Reading the Earl of Ellesmere's 
agreeable and usually well -written History of the Two 



860 



LECTURE ELEVENTH. 



Sieges of Vienna, I noted this sentence : speaking of So- 
bieski, he says, " inspired by the memory of former victo- 
ries, ... he flung his powerful frame into the saddle, 
and his great soul into the cause. " This is that juxtapo- 
sition of the literal and metaphorical, which is best exem- 
plified by a well-known instance in a panegyric on the 
celebrated Kobert Boyle, in which he was described as 
" father of chemistry, and brother of the Earl of Cork." 
Again, another form of the literary ludicrous, is in the in- 
congruous combination of metaphors produced by the 
want of discipline in speech, increased, perhaps, by an ex- 
cess of unguided fancy. Lord Castlereagh' s parliamentary 
speeches are said to have been full of such confusion of 
language— without, however, spoiling the speaker's high 
bearing and elegance of manner : in one of these speeches 
he used that sentence in which, perhaps, there is as curi- 
ous an infelicity of speech and confusion of figure as ever 
were crowded into as small a number of words, " And 
now, sir, I must embark into the feature on which this 
question chiefly hinges."* 

* My impression is, that these traditions as to Lord Castlereagh are 
not now regarded as trustworthy. His is one of the cases (I speak 
of the American mind) in which a healthy revolution of opinion may 
be traced. Thirty — nay, twenty — years ago, when Gallican sympathies 
were active, and Moore's clever pasquinades in every one's mouth, Lord 
Castlereagh was an especial object of disparagement. Let any one 
study his correspondence, lately published, especially in 1814 and 
1815, and it will be seen what a manly, honest-minded statesman he 
was. It is a matter, I believe, of well-ascertained diplomatic tradi- 
tion, that such was his uniform temper and tone in all his relations to 
this country. The fact, too, is unquestionable, that extreme conserva- 
tives, such as Lord Castlereagh and Lord Aberdeen have always shown 
more consideration, and made themselves more acceptable to our re- 
presentatives abroad, than others claiming to be more liberal. W. B. R, 



LITERATURE OF WIT 



AND HUMOUR. 



361 



And so in that form of error, which is regarded as be- 
longing pre-eminently to Lord Castlereagh's countrymen, 
that strange mixture of error and accuracy, called an 
" Irish bull/' the ludicrous effect is, I believe, produced 
by the sense working its way out through the complexity 
and confusion of the phrase. 

Sir Walter Scott, in the account of his tour in Ireland, 
mentions an occurrence which illustrates this form of the 
laughable, for it is a sort of bull in action. " They were 
widening/ 9 he says, " the road near Lord Claremont's seat 
as we passed. A number of cars were drawn up together 
at a particular point, where we also halted, as we under- 
stood they were blowing a rock, and the shot was expected 
presently to go off. After waiting two minutes or so, a 
fellow called out something, and our carriage as a planet, 
and the cars for satellites, started all forward at once, the 
Irishmen whooping and the horses galloping. Unable to 
learn the meaning of this, I was only left to suppose that 
they had delayed firing the intended shot till we should 
pass, and that we were passing quickly to make the delay 
as short as possible. No such thing ; by dint of making 
great haste, we got within ten yards of the rock just when 
the blast took place, throwing dust and gravel in our car- 
riage ; and had our postillion brought us a little nearer, 
(it was not for want of hollowing and flogging that he 
did not,) we should have had a still more serious share of 
the explosion. The explanation I received from the 
drivers was, that they had been told by the overseer that 
as the mine had been so long in going off, he dared 
say we would have time to pass it, so we just waited 
long enough to make the danger imminent. I have 
only to add, that two or three people got behind the 

31 



362 



LECTURE ELEVENTH. 



carriage, just for nothing but to see how our honours got 
past."* 

It is curious, let me remark, to observe how a form of 
expression which is essentially a bull, may be lifted out of 
the region of the ridiculous, as in that truly poetic expres- 
sion of Keats : 

" So the two brothers and their murdered man 
Rode toward fair Florence."f 

Now, if that be looked at in a prosaic point of view, it 
becomes a downright blunder, but, poetically, you see in 
it the activity of the imagination darting forward to the 
murder, a " ghastly foregone conclusion/' as Leigh Hunt 
has well called it. 

I have spoken of the incongruity of style : there may 
also be such incongruity of time as to make the anachron- 
ism laughable. Washington Irving, one of the finest of 
modern humorous writers, has shown this in that practical 
anachronism : " Rip Yan Winkle." It is, I believe, 
Horace Walpole, who tells of one of the family pictures 
of the De Levis, a French family that prided itself on its 
great antiquity ) it was a picture of an antediluvian scene, in 
which Noah was represented going into the ark with a 
bundle of the archives of the house of De Levi under his 
arm. J I have myself seen in a private library in this city 
an old Bible, with engravings, Dutch, I believe they were ; 
one of which pictured an Old Testament event; in the 
foreground Samson slaying the lion, if I remember rightly, 



* Lockhart's Scott. 

f Keats's Poetical "Works, p. 42. Isabella, or the Pot of Basil. 
J This is in a note by Lord Dover. Horace Walpole's joke is rather 
less decorous. Collected Works, vol. ii. p. 298. W. B. R. 



LITERATURE OF WIT AND HUMOUR, 



363 



and in the background a man with a fowling-piece shoot- 
ing snipe. 

These are broad incongruities, bordering upon the farci- 
cal : there are others ; either wilful or unconscious, which 
are more delicate in their impression. When Lady Sale 
made in her diary the simple entry, " Earthquakes as 
usual/ ' the humour was in the coolness of the womanly 
courage, and the notion of the frequency coupled with one 
of the rarest and most appalling of earthly perils. It was 
not unlike the advertisement beginning, " Anybody in 
want of a diving-bell," as if a diving-bell was one of the 
common wants in society. A quaint example recurs to 
my mind in this connection : it is in Horrebou's History 
of Iceland, an old folio volume, which is divided into 
chapters according to various subjects: one of these is 
headed (chapter 47,) " Concerning Owls." I can quote 
the whole chapter without fatiguing you, for it is in these 
words : " There are in Iceland no owls of any kind what- 
ever." Yet the historian seems to have considered him- 
self under some obligation to that species of birds, so far 
as to devote a chapter to their absence. 

These unexpected connections, which are produced by 
wit or humour, carried beyond the mere ludicrous effect, 
are seen also subserving argumentation, as these processes 
are combined by Swift in his " Drapier's Letters," and 
other occasional pieces ; by De Foe, or in later times by Wal- 
ter Scott, in his letters on the Scotch currency question ; 
and yet more in Sydney Smith's writings, the wittiest 
reasoning and satire in the language. There is, perhaps 
no more characteristic passage than that suggested by his 
reflections on the learned prolixity of Dr. Parr. " There 
is an event/ ' he goes on to say, " recorded in the Bible, 



364 



LECTURE ELEVENTH, 



which men who write books should keep constantly in 
their remembrance. It is there set forth ; that many cen- 
turies ago the earth was covered with a great flood, by 
which the whole of the human race, with the exception of 
one family, were destroyed. It appears also, that from 
thence a great alteration was made in the longevity of 
mankind, who, from a range of seven hundred or eight 
hundred years, were confined to their present period of 
seventy or eighty years. This epoch in the history of 
man gave birth to the twofold division of the antediluvian 
and the postdiluvian style of writing, the latter of which 
naturally contracted itself into those inferior limits which 
were better accommodated to the abridged duration of 
human life and literary labour. Now to forget this event, 
to write without the fear of the deluge before his eyes, 
and to handle a subject as if mankind could lounge over 
a pamphlet for ten years, as before their submersion, is to 
be guilty of the most grievous error into which a writer 
can possibly fall. The author of this book should call in 
the aid of some brilliant pencil, and cause the distressing 
scenes of the deluge to be pourtrayed in the most lively 
coiours for his use. He should gaze at Noah, and be 
brief. The ark should constantly remind him of the little 
time there is left for reading; and he should learn, as 
they did in the ark, to crowd a great deal of matter into 
a very little compass. ' v * This was written in Sydney 
Smith's early reviewing days; but his wit took a more 
concentrated form, as when he said of Lord John Russel, 
" His worst failure is that he is utterly ignorant of all 
moral fear ; there is nothing he would not undertake. I 



* Edinburgh Review, 1809. Works, vol. ii. p. 208, 



LITERATURE OF WIT AND HUMOUR. 



3o? 



believe lie would perform the operation for the stone, build 
St. Peter's, or assume (with or without ten minutes' notice) 
the command of the channel fleet; and no one would dis- 
cover by his manner that the patient had died, the church 
tumbled down, and the channel fleet been knocked to 
atoms j" and then he adds quietly in a note, " Another 
peculiarity of the Russels is, that they never alter their 
opinions : they are an excellent race, but they must be 
trepanned before they can be convinced/'* Nay, some- 
times the subtle element is concentrated in a single word 
or phrase, as when he speaks of " a gentleman lately from 
the Pyramids or the upper cataracts, let loose upon the 
drawing-room or that phrase, so excellent in the satire, 
and admitting unfortunately of such frequent application, 
which mentions an orator " splashing in the froth of his 
own rhetoric" — a descriptive image which is worth a whole 
chapter of rhetorical admonition. 

This combination of wit and reasoning makes also much 
of the virtue of that instruction which, in Fables, charms 
the mind of childhood, and is not cast aside by mature 
reason. It enters, too, into a people's instruction by pro- 
verbs, which have been happily described as " the wisdom 
of many and the wit of one." 

One of the most remarkable uses of wit and humour, is 
that which combines them with tragedy, and makes them 
subservient to tragic effect. These combinations seem to 
be denied to modern art by the refinement or daintiness 
of later times; and by such denial, modern art loses much 
of the power which resulted from that natural blending 
of the humorous and the serious, each equally earnest, 



* Second Letter to Archdeacon Singleton, Works, vol. iii. p. 193, 194. 

31* 



366 



LECTURE ELEVENTH. 



which may be seen in the early minstrelsy, and in the 
highest form of genius and art in Shakspeare's deepest 
tragedies. The most careless reader must have noticed 
how profoundly the tragic pathos of King Lear is deepened 
by the wild wit and pathetic humour of that faithful 
and full-hearted follower — the fool. Remember how, in 
Hamlet, one of the most solemn scenes is preceded by 
the quaint professional witticisms of the gravedigger, 
so different and yet not discordant. In Macbeth the brief 
and awful interval between the murder of Duncan, and 
the disclosure of it, is filled with that rudely-comic passage 
of the drunken, half-sobered porter, to whose gross jocu- 
larity you pass from the high- wrought frenzy of Macbeth, 
reeking with his victim's blood, and from the yet more 
fearful atrocity of his wife, to return quickly to the tragic 
horror on the discovery of the murder ; and in that transi- 
tion, through a species of the comic, the harmony is pre- 
served by the quaint allusions to hell and the vain equivo- 
cations to heaven. 

Another kindred combination, which also shows a unity 
connecting the serious and the sportive, proving what 
Socrates is said to have asserted, that there is a common 
ground for tragedy and comedy, is in that contrast between 
the thought or feeling and its expression, which is termed 
"irony" It is the humorous wresting of language from 
its literal use for the expression of feeling, either happy 
or painful, but too vehement to be contented with that 
literal use. The pensive perplexity of a gentle and phi- 
losophic soul like Hamlet, bewildered and self-secluded in 
a wicked world, finds relief in almost every form of bitter 
or tranquil humour for meditations and for emotions that 
overmastered him. When the thoughtful spirit of Mac- 



LITERATURE OF WIT AND HUMOUR. 



867 



beth is distorted by guilt, and as the agony of that guilt 
grows more and more intense, the pent-up misery either 
flows forth in a subdued irony, or breaks out in that which 
is fierce and frenzied. In one very familiar passage, the 
beauty of the expression makes many a reader forget that 
it is pure and essential irony : when Macbeth puts to the 
Doctor the simple and literal inquiry after Lady Mabeth : 

" How does your patient, doctor ? 

Doctor. Not so sick, my lord, 
As she is troubled with thick-coming fancies, 
That keep her from her rest/' 

Then comes the deep feeling, with its ironical questions, 
sounding more like soliloquy : 

" Cure her of that : 
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased ? 
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow ? 
Raze out the written troubles of the brain ? 
And, with some sweet, oblivious antidote, 
Cleanse the stufTd bosom of that perilous grief 
Which weighs upon the heart ?" 

The literal answer — 

" Therein the patient 
Must minister to himself" — 

brings him back to reality with the exclamation, 

" Throw physic to the dogs, I'll none of it !" 

But, even in the irritable putting on of his armour, the 
bitter relief of an ironical humour comes again in ano- 
ther form : 

"What rhubarb, senna, or what purgative drug 
Would scour these English hence ?" 

If the truthfulness of such use of irony be doubted, let 



868 



LECTURE ELEVENTH. 



it be remembered how abundantly and remarkably it per- 
vades Holy Writ. I do not refer merely to the bitter, 
ironical taunts which the prophet hurled at the priests of 
Baal, but to the manifold use of it in the expression of 
thoughts and emotions affecting the spiritual intercourse 
of man and his Maker. Remember how something of 
the kind breaks out in the very midst of St. Paul's most 
solemn argument. Again, it is not contrary to nature — 
it is not a levity unworthy of man's nature — that these 
playful faculties make their appearance in the most awful 
realities of life. The gentle spirit of Anne Boleyn was 
pleasant with the headsman on the scaffold ; and so 

" More's gay genius played 
With the inoffensive sword of native wit, 
Than the bare axe more luminous and keen."* 

The power of wit to combine itself harmoniously and 
vigorously with sagacity and seriousness, is eminently ex- 
emplified in all the works of that remarkable author of 
the seventeenth century, the church historian, Thomas 
Fuller, whose wit, in the largeness of its circuit, the va- 
riety of its expression, its exuberance, and its admirable 
sanity, stands second only to that of Shakspeare. It has 
the indispensable merit of perfect naturalness, and the 
excellence of being a growth from a soil of sound wisdom. 
There are no large works in our language so thoroughly 
ingrained with wit and humour as Fuller's " Worthies of 
England," his Church History of Britain no less so, and 
the essays entitled "The Holy and Profane Stated- 
essays which, in wit, and wisdom, and just feeling, are 
not unlike the Elia Essays of Charles Lamb. The genius 



* Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Sonnets, Sonnet 22. 



LTERATURE OF WIT AND HUMOUR. 



369 



of Fuller is, perhaps, unequalled in harmonizing a play 
upon words, quiet jocularity, kindly irony, with thought- 
fulness and genuine earnestness, and in making the tran- 
sition from quaintness to sublimity. 

The great satire of the eighteenth century, "Gulliver's 
Travels," exemplifies another form of wit, too often repul- 
sive, not only by indecent coarseness, but by that misan- 
thropy which darkens the writings of Swift. His morbid 
contemplation of the vices and follies of his fellow-beings 
betrays the disease which, probably, clung to. his whole 
life, distorting and darkening it with the dread that in- 
sanity had a lurking-place in his brain — that haunting 
consciousness, which once was expressed when walking 
with the author of the Night Thoughts, (like himself a 
dealer in distempered fancies and feelings,) Swift, after 
gazing earnestly at a noble elm which was, in its upper- 
most branches, withered and decayed, pointing to it, said 
to Dr. Young, " I shall be like that tree — I shall die at 
the top."* Arbuthnot, the friend of Swift and Pope, 
is believed to have had more learning and as much wit 
as either of them, and with it all a sweetness of temper 
and purity of character which made Swift exclaim, " Oh, 
if the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots in it, I would 
burn my Travels !" It is a sad pity that his genius was 
not more open to influences of such a character, or of the 
equally admirable and amiable nature of his other friend, 
Bishop Berkeley. 

The best and most agreeable specimen of English humour 
(it is humour in contrast to wit) which belongs to that 
period, is Steele's invention, and Addison's use, of the 



* Scott's Life of Swift, p. 291 . Am. ed. 



370 



LECTURE ELEVENTH. 



character of Sir Boger de Coverley. This will be felt by 
any one who will select the papers in the Spectator which 
are devoted to hiin, and read them continuously, following 
the good knight to his mansion, to the assizes, to the 
parish church, where, as soon as he wakes out of a nap 
during the sermon, he sends his footman to wake up any 
of the congregation who chance to be asleep ) then onward 
to his death-bed, after having bequeathed (his will chanced 
to be written on a very cold day) a stout frieze coat to the 
men, and a comfortable hood to the women, in the parish. 
The same species of pure, genial, wise, and healthful hu- 
mour has been sustained in the incomparable Vicar of 
Wakefield, and in the writings of our countryman, Wash- 
ington Irving, who is gifted with many of the best quali- 
ties of Goldsmith's genius. Among the humorous wri- 
ters belonging to the literature of our own day, (there are 
several whom I will not stop to name,) Charles Lamb repre- 
sented a form of humour of a very high order, and peculiar 
to himself — a humour which has assumed a deeper interest 
and commands a higher admiration, now that we know the 
terrible memories and sorrows of his days — 

" The troubles strange, 
Many and strange, that hung about his life,"* 

and his heroic self-devotion to his afflicted sister. 

Oar English literature of wit and humour gives abun- 
dant proqf that these faculties may be either a precious or 
a perilous possession j precious, as ministering to thought- 
ful cheerfulness, and serving the cause of truth and gen- 
tleness; perilous, as coupled with intellectual pride and 



* Wordsworth's Lines, written after the death of Charles Lamb, 
p. 467, Am. ed. 



LITERATURE OF WIT AND HUMOUR. 



371 



malevolent passions. I have spoken of the repulsive cha- 
racter of the wit of Dean Swift — still, if unattractive, there 
was something in his stern hatred of vice and folly, which 
commands respect; but when you turn to such as Lord 
Byron's, (as in Don Juan,) there is disease without a par- 
ticle of the dignity of disease ; there is lawless force of 
mind, owning no restraint of reverence for aught human 
or divine — sustained by no self-respect, by no confidence 
in virtue — womanly, even less than manly. Thus wit 
sinks down into barren scoffing. It is the lowest moral 
condition when crime clothes itself with jest. Salutary as 
the culture of the faculties of wit and humour may be, 
when justly proportioned and controlled, the indulgence 
of them as a habit is as injurious to him who so indulges 
it, as it is wearisome to all who encounter it. The habit 
of always looking at things on the laughable side is sure 
to lower the tone of thought and feeling, and at length 
can only content its restless craving by attributing the ridi- 
culous to things which ought to be inviolate by such as- 
sociation. When the habitual joker is sometimes seized 
with a fit of seriousness, the change is such an incongruity, 
as to provoke the retaliation of unseasonable jocularity, 
and no one is as sensitive to ridicule as he who habitually 
handles it. 

Another abuse which may be observed in intercourse 
with the world, is when jocularity is employed as subter- 
fuge, to escape from the demands of earnestness and can- 
dour, and the jest is made a method of non-committal. 
It is said that Sir Robert "Walpole used to divert his guests 
away from political conversation by a strain of ribald jest- 
ing; and a more modern prime minister, the late Lord 
Melbourne, is described as one whose first impulse, in ordi- 



372 



LECTURE ELEVENTH. 



nary conversation, was always to treat things lightly. This 
was an adroitness, which a higher order of statesmanship 
does not concern itself to use. 

As a habit, wit will prove fatal to that better and wiser 
cheerfulness which is attendant on imaginative culture — 
the genuine poetic habit of beholding or discovering the 
beauty of truth, of moral worth, and whatever of beauty, 
spiritual or material, is given to man to enjoy. It is said 
that Hogarth lamented his talent for caricature, as the 
long practice of it had impaired his capacity for the enjoy- 
ment of beauty : while the best critic on his works ap- 
plauded him as an artist "in whom the satirist never ex- 
tinguished that love of beauty which belonged to him as 
a poet;" and who so used his genius as to "prevent the 
instructive merriment at the whims of nature, or the foi- 
bles or humours, of our fellow-men from degenerating into 
the heart-poison of contempt or hatred." 

It is a narrowness of mind which causes the exclusion 
of either the poetic sense or of wit ; it is partial moral 
culture which refuses the good that is to be gained from 
either. The larger mind and the well-disciplined heart 
find room for both powers to dwell together in harmony. 
Of such harmony let me give a single example in proof — 
a transition from a passage of well-conceived and well- 
expressed satire to one no less distinguished by a deep 
poetic sense of beauty; 01 rather not so much a transition 
as a harmonious combination. I quote two passages which 
occur in close connection in the work of a living author — 
Mr. Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture. 

" Another of the strange tendencies of the present day 
is to the decoration of the railroad station. Now if 
there be any place in the world in which people are de- 



LITERATURE OF WIT AND HUMOUR. 



376 



prived of that portion of temper and discretion which are 
necessary to the contemplation of beauty, it is there. It 
is the very temple of discomfort, and the only charity that 
the builder can extend to us is to show us, plainly as may 
as may be, how soonest to escape from it. The whole 
system of railroad travelling is addressed to people who, 
* being in a hurry, are therefore, for the time being, misera- 
ble. No one would travel in that manner who could help it, 
who had time to go leisure^ over hills and between hedges, 
instead of through tunnels and between banks ; at least 
those who would, have no sense of beauty so acute as that 
we need consult it at the station. The railroad is, in all 
its relations, a matter of earnest business, to be got through 
as soon as possible. It transmutes a man from a traveller 
into a living parcel. For the time, he has parted with the 
nobler characteristics of his humanity for the sake of a 
planetary power of locomotion. Do not ask him to ad- 
mire any thing. You might as well ask the wind. Carry 
him safely, dismiss him soon : he will thank you for no- 
thing else. All attempts to please him in any other way 
are mere mockery, and insults to the things by which you 
endeavour to do so. There never was more flagrant nor 
impertinent folly than the smallest portion of ornament in 
any thing concerned with railroads or near them. Keep 
them out of the way, take them through the ugliest coun- 
try you can find, confess them the miserable things they 
are, and spend nothing upon them but for safety and 
speed."* 

Now turning from satire on ornament misplaced to the 
sense of beauty well-placed : 



* Seven Lamps of Architecture p. 106. The Lamp of Beauty. 
Y 32 



374 



LECTURE ELEVENTH. 



" The question of greatest external or internal decora- 
tion depends entirely on the condition of probable repose. 
It was a wise feeling which made the streets of Venice so 
rich in external ornament, for there is no couch of rest 
like the gondola. So, again, there is no subject of street 
ornament so wisely chosen as the fountain, where it is a 
fountain of use; for it is just there that perhaps the hap- 
piest pause takes place in the labour of the day, when the 
pitcher is rested on the edge of it, and the breath of the 
bearer is drawn deeply, and the hair swept from the fore 
head, and the uprightness of the form declined against 
the marble ledge, and the sound of the kind word or light 
laugh mixes with the trickle of the falling water, heard 
shriller and shriller as the pitcher fills. What pause is so 
sweet as that — so full of the depth of ancient days, so 
softened with the calm of pastoral solitude V 



LECTURE XII. 



®fje ^xkxutmt of Sffitrxting * 

Characteristics of a true letter — Historical and familiar letters — Lord 
Bacon — Dr. Arnold's remarks — Despatches of Marlborough — Nel- 
son — Franklin — John Adams — Reception by George III. — Wash- 
ington's correspondence — Bishop White's anecdote of Washington 
— American diplomatic correspondence — Lord Chatham's Letters — 
Duke of Wellington's — Archdeacon Hare's remarks on — General 
Taylor's official letters — Familiar letters — Cowley — Impropriety of 
publishing private correspondence — Arbuthnot and Johnson's re- 
marks on — Burns's Letters — Tennyson — Howell's Letters — The 
Paston Letters — Lady Russell's — Pope's — Hartley Coleridge's remark 
— Chesterfield — Horace Walpole — Swift and Gray's — Cowper's — 
Scott's — Byron's — Southey's, and Lamb's Letters of Dedication — 
Lamb's to his sister. 

In devoting a lecture to what I have entitled u The 
Literature of Letter- Writing/' I had less hope of being 
able to make the treatment of such a subject interesting 
than of pointing out some of the uses of this department, 
and suggesting the agreeable and instructive reading 
which is to be found in collections of letters. It is a de- 
partment which may be viewed in several aspects, either 
as tributary to history, political or literary, or as a form 



* March 20, 1851. Had I no other reason for publishing this, the 
last of this series of lectures, I could find one in the familiarity it 
shows with American history and its original materials. Thoroughly 
imbued as was the writer with the spirit and sentiment of English 
literature, he was as well-informed in all that related to his own coun- 
try, its men, and its republican institutions. W. B. R. 

375 



376 



LECTURE TWELFTH. 



of biography — thus helping us to a knowledge of the 
movements of mankind, or of individual character, by its 
written disclosures. Our English literature is enriched 
with collections of remarkable and very various interest : 
so varied as to furnish an abundant adaptation to different 
tastes. In treating this subject, my aim will be to endea- 
vour not to wander off into either history or biography, 
but, as far as possible, to confine my attention to the 
epistolary literature in itself, making some comments 
on the principal collections, and incidentally considering 
the character of a true letter. It happens not unfre- 
quently that the form of the letter is assumed for the sake 
of convenience, when neither the writer nor the hearer is 
at all deluded in the belief that the production is what ij 
usually understood by the term "a letter," or epistle. 
Essays, disquisitions, satires, wear the epistolary name 
and garb, fulfilling a not unreasonable fancy of the writer 
that such a medium interposes less of formality between 
him and his readers, and, indeed, brings them into closer 
and more life-like relations — the letter being somehow 
more of a reality between the writer and the recipient, 
than a book is between the author and the reader. The 
"Drapier's Letters" of Swift, Bolingbroke's Letter to 
Wyndham, the " Letters of Junius," Burke's " Re- 
flections on the French Bevolution," and other similar 
productions, of which there are many with an epistolary 
designation, do not belong to the proper class of " Letters 
to which class I propose to confine my attention — at the 
outset simply suggesting to your minds that it is a subject 
which does not admit of convenient illustration in a 
Lecture. 

I have arranged this subject under the two general di- 



LITERATURE OF LETTER- WRITING. 



877 



visions " historical letters" and " familiar letters" — an 
arrangement which may be found convenient in the gene- 
ral consideration of it, but which makes no pretension to 
any thing of logical precision. Under the first head, I 
do not propose to limit the class to public or official cor- 
respondence, but rather to comprehend such letters, whe- 
ther public or private, which subserve a knowledge of 
history, and are thus valuable in the study of it : while 
the second class, being under a more exact principle of 
classification, is intended to include those private letters, 
the nature of which is readily understood by the title 
" Familiar Letters;" and the true aim and character of 
which I will endeavour to explain, when I come to that 
division of my subject. 

Lord Bacon, in his treatise on the Advancement of 
Learning — that great legacy, so rich in counsel for the 
guidance of inquiry in various departments of human 
knowledge, that treasury of sagacious sentences of ad- 
vice — has specially referred to letters among what he calls 
the " Appendices" to history. "Letters," he says, "are 
according to all the variety of occasions, advertisements, 
advices, directions, propositions, petitions, commendatory, 
expostulatory, satisfactory ) of compliment, of pleasure, 
of discourse, and all other passages of action. And such 
as are written from wise men are, of all the words of man, 
in my judgment, the best; for they are more natural 
than orations and public speeches, and more advised 
than conferences or private ones. So, again, letters of 
affairs from such as manage them, or are privy to them, 
are, of all others, the best instructions for history, and, to 
a diligent reader, the best histories in themselves." 

Another wise counsellor, in a later day, the late Dt 



fcJLCTURE TWELFTH. 



Arnold, speaking words of special advice to the student 
of history, after noticing that " alchemy which can change 
apparently dull (historical) materials into bright gold," 
adds, u some of the great men of our age have, in all 
probability, left some memorials of their minds behind 
them— speeches, it may be, or letters, or a journal ; or, 
possibly, works of a deeper character, in which they have 
handled, expressly and deliberately, some of the ques- 
tions which most interested their generation. Now, if 
our former researches have enabled us to people our view 
of the past with many images of events, institutions, 
usages, titles, etc., to make up with some completeness 
what may be called the still life of the picture, we shall 
next be anxious to people it also with the images of its 
great individual men, to change it, as it were, from a 
landscape or a view of buildings, to what may truly be 
called an historical picture. Whoever has made himself 
famous by his actions, or even by his rank or position in 
society, so that his name is at once familiar to our ears, 
such a man's writings have an interest for us even before 
we begin to read them ; the instant that he gets up, as it 
were, to address us, we are hushed into the deepest atten- 
tion. These works give us an insight not only into the 
spirit of an age, as exemplified in the minds of its greatest 
men, but they multiply, in some sort, the number of those 
with whom we are personally and individually in sym- 
pathy 5 they enable us to recognise, amid the dimness of 
remote and uncongenial ages, the features of friends and 
of brethren." 

Of the many indications of the great activity and zeal 
of historical research and study, which distinguishes the 
present times, none is more remarkable than the care 



LITERATURE OF LETTER- WRITING. 



379 



which has been bestowed in collecting and publishing the 
letters, official and private, of men eminent in their day 
and in the thoughts of posterity — men illustrious in civil 
or military life. Within a short period this has grown to 
be an extensive and most valuable department of historical 
literature ; and the light that has issued from it has not 
only dispelled frequently much of traditional, oft-re- 
peated error, but given to the historian, both student and 
writer, larger privileges of power to gain the truth, and 
new duties in striving for it. It is within a few years 
past that English history has been illustrated by the pub- 
lication of Cromwell's letters, of the letters of the Duke 
of Marlborough, the Stuart papers, the letters to and 
from the leader of that luckless family during all their 
years of hope and despair for the recovery of the throne 
of England, the correspondence of Lord Chatham, the 
despatches of Nelson, and all the despatches and general 
orders of the Duke of Wellington, beginning at a camp 
in India and closing after the battle of Waterloo. In 
American history, the contributions of epistolary materials 
have been no less valuable ; for we have the whole series 
of the letters of Washington, extending through his ca- 
reer of military and civil services, and illustrating both 
his public and private life ; the letters of Dr. Franklin, 
comprehending a scientific, as well as political, career, 
and the composite collection of letters from various pens, 
entitled " The Diplomatic Correspondence of the Revo- 
lution and of the period of the Confederation. " Many 
other collections of letters have appeared both in England 
and the United States ; but the most important which I 
have mentioned amply exemplify the extent to which his- 
tory has of late received contributions of this kind. 



380 



LECTURE TWELFTH. 



Their general historical value I need not stop to speak of; 
but let me remark that, as many minds are attracted by 
biography, and find in the deeds and words of their fel- 
low-men individually an interest and sympathy more vivid 
than that which general history inspires, a collection of 
letters may have such completeness — may be so identified, 
both as to time and the participation of the writer in 
public events — that history may be read in the letters, and 
thus achieved through the medium of biography. It is 
a method of reading which will be found very agreeable, 
as well as instructive, and has a peculiar advantage, too, 
in giving the reader that discipline of mind which may 
be gained by the effort, to which he is attracted con- 
sciously, or unawares, of giving something of historical 
consistency to the informal and familiar narrative of 
events found in a series of letters \ and, further, the moral 
discipline of freer opinion, instead of that more submis- 
sive process of always having his mind made up for him 
by that kind of historical dictation of which Charles 
Lamb complained, when he said, " The modern historian 
flings at once the dead weight of his own judgment into 
the scale, and settles the matter," when a wider and more 
independent sense of truth would come to a less arbitrary 
conclusion. 

To all readers of history, whether the taste be for pure 
history or for biography, a letter will often give a reality 
to an historical occurrence, the truth of which is other- 
wise much less life-like. Allow me to give an illustration 
of this in a well-known incident in our own history. I 
refer to what may be considered the very last fact in the 
history of the war of American Independence, the shaking 
of hands as it were, when the fighting was done, the re- 



LITERATURE OF LETTER-WRITING. 



381 



ception by George the Third of the first American ambas- 
sador, which consummated the treaty of peace, and the 
recognition by Great Britain of the United States among 
the nations of the earth. The pertinacity with which the 
British monarch had protracted the war, while it showed 
the unwise statesmanship of the times, illustrated two 
traits in the king's character — his obstinacy and his ho- 
nesty. He probably thought he had no more right to con- 
sent to the partition of the British Empire than to pawn 
or part with the crown jewels; and thus an unwise and 
unnatural war was lengthened out, even after the ques- 
tion of independence was practically set tled. The obstinacy 
of the sovereign had, however, an element of uprightness 
in it, which may be spoken of with respect, especially 
when one reflects on what is not so generally known, that 
anxiety and sleeplessness, during the American war, are 
believed, by those who had opportunities of judging, to 
have laid the foundation of that mental malady with 
which George the Third was afflicted during many of the 
latter years of his life. The first American minister to 
his court was, let it be remembered, John Adams, one 
whose name could not but have been familiar to the king 
as one of the earliest and most strenuous of the leaders of 
colonial resistance. The interview on his reception was 
one full of impressive recollections for both, accompanied 
with more than ordinary emotion, and it comes within 
the scope of general history to record that it was conducted 
in a manner honourable to each. It is, however, Mr. 
Adams's letter to Mr. Jay that alone produces an adequate 
conception of the interview. Mr. Adams mentions, that 
his first thought and intention was to deliver his creden- 
tials silently and retire, but being advised by several of 



382 



LECTURE TWELFTH. 



the other foreign ministers to make a speech, he made a 
short address to the king, concluding with the expression 
of the hope of " being instrumental in restoring an entire 
esteem, confidence, and affection, or, in better words, the 
old good-nature and the old good-humour, between peo- 
ple who, though separated by an ocean, and under differ- 
ent governments, have the same language, a similar 
religion, and kindred blood/' 

This was well said — worthy of the representative of the 
young nation — manly thoughts and feelings, well meant 
and well worded. Mr. Adams, in his letter, goes on to 
say : u The King listened to every word I said with dignity, 
but with an apparent emotion. Whether it was the nature 
of the interview, or whether it was my visible agitation, for 
I felt more than I did or could express, that touched him, I 
cannot say ; but he was much affected, and answered me 
with more tremor than I had spoken with, and said — - 

H i Sir, the circumstances of this audience are so extra- 
ordinary, the language you have now held is so extremely 
proper, and the feelings you have discovered so justly 
adapted to the occasion, that I must say that I not only 
receive with pleasure the assurance of the friendly dispo- 
sitions of the United States, but that I am very glad the 
choice has fallen upon you to be their minister. I wish 
you, sir, to believe, and that it may be understood in 
America, that I have done nothing in the late contest 
but what I thought myself indispensably bound to do by 
the duty which I owed to my people. I will be very frank 
with you. I was the last to consent to the separation; 
but the separation having been made, and having become 
inevitable, I nave always said, as I say now, that I would 
be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as 



LITERATURE OF LETTER- WRITING. 



5>3 



an independent power/ " , . . Mr. Adams adds, " He 
(the king) was much affected, and I was not less so;" and 
certainly the occasion, as thus pictured in a letter was one 
fitted to awaken no small emotion, a conflict of many 
emotions, for how at that moment, must the memories of 
twenty years of civil strife, with all its varying fortunes 
and hopes, have risen up to the minds of those two men as 
they were thus confronted ! If there had been obstinacy 
and wrong in the royal policy which had assented to the 
first restrictive measure on xlmerican trade in 1764, to 
the Stamp Act, to the Boston Port Bill, to the conduct 
of the war, at once cruel and imbecile, to that greatest and 
most tyrannic error, fatal of itself to reconciliation, the 
hiring of the Hessians — there was on the other hand 
good feeling and a manly frankness in the expression, at 
the close of twenty years from the beginning of the colo- 
nial difhulties, of a solicitude that it might be understood 
in America that in all, he had done nothing but what he 
thought himself in duty bound to do. 

Not the least interesting portion of such a letter is that 
which describes what passed after the formalities of the 
interview were over. " The King/' writes Mr. Adanis, 
" then asked me whether I came last from France, and 
upon my answering in the affirmative, he put on an air 
of familiarity, and smiling, or rather laughing, said, There 
is an opinion among some people that you are not the 
most attached of all your countrymen to the manners of 
France. I was surprised at this, because I thought it 
an indiscretion and a departure from dignity. I was a 
little embarrassed, but determined not to deny the truth, 
on the one hand, nor leave him to infer from it any 
attachment to England, on the other. I threw off as 



384 



LECTUBE TWELFTH. 



much of gravity as I could, and assumed an air of gayety 
and a tone of decision as far as was decent, and said, That 
opinion, sir, was not mistaken. I must avow to your 
majesty I have no attachment but to my own country. 
The king replied, as quick as lightning, An honest (man) 
will never have any other." 

I have quoted these passages to show how a letter may 
place a familiar piece of history in a more vivid light of 
truth and reality than mere historic narration gives to it ; 
illustrating Horace Walpole's remark that " nothing gives 
so just an idea of an age as genuine letters; nay, history 
waits for its last seal from them." 

It is in another letter from John Adams to John Jay 
that there occurs a character of George the Third, as just, 
probably, as has been written. "The King, I really 
think," says Mr. Adams, "is the most accomplished cour- 
tier in his dominions ; with all the affability of Charles 
the Second, he has all the domestic virtues and regularity 
of conduct of Charles the First. He is the greatest talker 
in the world, and a tenacious memory stored with resources 
of small talk, concerning all the little things of life, which 
are inexhaustible. But so much of his time is and has 
been consumed in this, that he is, in all the great affairs 
of society and government, as weak, as far as I can judge, 
as we ever understood him to be in America. He is also 
as obstinate. The unbounded popularity acquired by his 
temperance and facetiousness, added to the splendour of 
his dignity, gives him such a continual feast of flatterv, 
that he thinks all he does is right, and he pursues his 
own ideas with a firmness which would become the best 
By stem of action. He has a pleasure in his own will and 
way, without which he would be miserable, which seems 



LITERATURE 03? LETTER- WRITING. 385 



to be the true principle upon which he has always chosen 
and rejected ministers."* 

It is a happy thing for the student of history, and 
indeed for the American citizen, that the letters of 
Washington have been preserved in remarkable com- 
pleteness — -a result in no small degree owing to those 
exact habits of business which a controlling sense of duty 
carried through his whole career. The manifold lessons 
which those letters inculcate are as legible as that admi- 
rable handwriting, which, without pretensions to elegance^ 
or that delicacy which often belongs to the pen of men of 
letters, (such as Gray's, and Cowper's, and Southey's,) is 
eminently characteristic in its uniformity, regularity, and 
firmness. The historical value of the letters may readily be 
conceived, when it is remembered that they extend over 
the whole era of early American nationality, connecting 
it by actual presence and participation. I speak of that 
era in an extended completeness, beginning with the old 
French war, which is properly to be regarded as part of 
the preparation for the War of Independence, continued 
onward through the Revolution, its immediate sequel, the 
feeble period of the Confederation, and the triumphant 
completion of the political change in the establishment 



* The recently-published diary of Mr. Adams contains, under date 
of 30th March, 1786, the following very characteristic entry : 

"Went at nine o'clock to the French ambassador's ball, where were 
two or three hundred people, chiefly ladies. Here I met the Marquis 
of Lansdowne and the Earl of Harcourt. These two noblemen ventured 
to enter into conversation with me; so did Sir George Young. But 
there is an awkward timidity in general. This people cannot look 
me in the face ; there is conscious guilt and shame in their counte- 
nances when they look at me. They feel they have behaved ill, ano 
that I am sensible of it." Works of John Adams, vol. iii. p. 393. 

33 



386 LECTURE TWELFTH 

of the Constitution, and Washington's administration ; 
nay, beyond that, to the tranquil evening of that life so 
matchless in its harmony, in its freedom from contradic- 
tions, the quiet glory of its close in the rural seclusion 
of Mount Vernon. Now the history of that whole era 
may be read as it is reflected in the clear mirror of that 
mind, undimmed by any unworthy passion, and capacious 
enough to hold within it the image of his country's annals 
for near half a century. Nowhere can so well be seen 
first the dutiful and not degrading loyalty of a colonial 
subject, giving to his king and country a soldier's ser- 
vice ; the no less dutiful, but far more difficult, transition 
from loyal obedience to resistance; the progress from 
peaceful to armed resistance; the magnanimous self-con- 
trol and heroism alike in the prosperity and adversity 
of military command ; the perpetual sense of subordination 
to law; and the willing, happy laying down of power 
when the purposes of that power were achieved in the 
public good. It needs no comment to show how the 
Washington letters illustrate all the eventful years of his 
life, but there are other portions of it less attractive and 
less known, on which the letters alone throw light. In a 
course of historical lectures I had occasion lately to treat 
of that uneventful, that uninviting but instructive period 
between the peace of 1783 and the adoption of the present 
Constitution — those latter years of the Confederation, when 
the nation seemed to be sinking from the height of its 
new independence down into anarchy and the world's 
contempt; and nothing seemed to my mind to express 
with so deep and sad an eloquence the gloom which was 
gathering over the land, as the simple words of disappoint- 
ment and depression which Washington was sending 



LITERATURE OF LETTER- WRITING. 



387 



from Mount Vernon to his friends and correspondents. 
The feeling approaching to despair, which he uttered in 
confidence in the darkest days of the war, before the bat- 
tle of Trenton, had something far more placid and less 
painful than the bitterness of disappointment and distrust 
occasioned by what seemed so like popular degeneracy in 
a season of safety. 

The letters of Washington serve another purpose, in 
completing a biographical impression which often is in- 
complete — made so by the very awe which his character 
inspires. The most usual idea of that character is perhaps 
that which presents it in a kind of marmoreal purity and 
majestic repose ; a truthful idealizing of those high and 
heroic attributes of his nature which lift him, if not above, 
into a lofty region of humanity; such a conception as a 
great American sculptor has embodied in marble, and 
which Southey had in his thoughts, when, in one of his 
lyrics, he spake of America as the land 

"Where Washington hath left 
His awful memory, 
A light for after times."* 

It is in no contradiction to, but in perfect harmony with, 
this aspect of his character, that other phases of it are 
visible in his letters. The same sense of duty and lofty 
self-respect, which at times produced a passionless and im- 
perturbable dignity, admit at other times the utterance of 
a vehement and righteous indignation, or a placid and 
half-humorous tenderness for some amiable frailty of a 
fellow-being. This, too, is made manifest, that in all his 
large and varied intercourse with men, there was no repul 



* Southey's Works, vol. iii. p. 221. 



LECTURE TWELFTH. 



sive or oppressive dignity, but a genial and modest com- 
munion with them, and even an affectionate fellowship 
with those who were closely associated with him in the 
public service or in private life. In short, the letters show, 
what history cannot do, the gentle side of the great man's 
nature, which endeared him to all who came within the 
influence of it; there is proof of this in a little incident 
which might easily have perished out of the memories of 
men, if it had not been witnessed by one upon whose 
genuine delicacy of feeling it was not lost, and who wisely 
judged it worthy of record. The incident is so simple, 
and Bishop White's little narrative of it is given with 
such graceful simplicity, that I almost fear the feeling 
cannot be communicated by repetition. It was in a letter 
to the biographer of Washington that Bishop White com- 
municated what may be entitled an 

ANECDOTE CONCERNING PRESIDENT WASHINGTON. 

" On the day before his leaving the presidential chair, 
a large company dined with him. Among them were the 
foreign ministers and their ladies, Mr. and Mrs. Adams, 
Mr. J efferson, with other conspicuous persons of both 
sexes. During the dinner much hilarity prevailed ; but 
on the removal of the cloth, it was put an end to by the 
President— certainly without design. Having filled his 
glass, he addressed the company, with a smile on his coun- 
tenance, as nearly as can be recollected, in the following 
terms : 6 Ladies and gentleman, this is the last time I shall 
drink your health as a public man. I do it with sincerity, 
and wishing you all possible happiness/ There was 
an end to all pleasantry. He who gives this relation 



LITERATURE OF LETTER-WRITING. 



389 



accidentally directed his eye to the lady of the British 
minister, (Mrs. Liston,) and tears were running down 
her cheeks."* 

I have referred to this as proof of that blending of 
the gentle with more impressive traits of character, 
which may be seen in Letters and not on the pages 
of history. 

The letters of Dr. Franklin were in like manner re- 
markable for their extended historical interest — more ex- 
tended indeed than Washington's, both in time and place, 
for the correspondence, continuing nearly as late, began 
much earlier, and carries the reader, therefore, further 
back into colonial society ; it was enlarged, too, by a long 
and renewed European residence, first in England, with 
intercourse with Lord Chatham and other British states- 
men friendly to the colonial cause, and to Franklin person- 
ally ; and afterwards in France, where the sagacious and 
simply-attired republican was a fashionable novelty, ca- 
ressed by the nobles and ladies of the court of Louis the 
Sixteenth. The letters of Franklin have also an addi- 
tional interest by his connection with that large commu- 
nity, the society of men of science, not limited to the 
soil of any country. It is a correspondence which has fur- 
ther attraction, as showing that fine mastery which Frank- 
lin — by the help of a plain but substantial education, by 



* Dr. Wilson's Memoir of Bishop White, p. 191. Let me here re- 
cord the expression of my regret that the editor of a work published 
lately in this country called " The Republican Court/' (p. 305,) should 
have preserved, on very uncertain, and, to my mind doubtful, tradition, 
an anecdote of Washington's violence of language and temper in 
most painful contrast with this anecdote W. B. 
Z 33* 



390 LECTURE TWELFTH. 

native sagacity, and continued culture — acquired in the use 
of good English speech.* 

The American diplomatic correspondence of that period 
is interesting, too, as containing the impressions of sagacious 
men trained in the simplicity of republican life, (for the 
British colonies in America were virtually republics before 
independence;) such men brought into contact with artifi- 
cial European society, and with political systems fast tend- 
ing towards the great revolutionary convulsions at the close 
of the last century. It is not the least instructive portion 
of American state-papers, which somewhat later describes 
the progress of the French Revolution, as it appeared to 
one with high-toned, aristocratic political views, like Mr. 
Grouverneur Morris, or to one with democratic inclinations, 
like Mr. Monroe, and whose letters have respectively re- 
corded what they witnessed in revolutionary Paris. 

It is an easy and natural transition from the statesmen 
of the American Revolution to one who, in Parliament, 
was the friend and advocate of America in the hour of 
need— the Earl of Chatham ; he who, as William Pitt, holds 
a title of the world's bestowing, "the great Commoner 
who gave to England, in that corrupt and degenerate 
eighteenth century, the example of a pure and lofty pa- 
triotism, and whose statesmanship may be paralleled with 



* I know of few more graceful specimens of style than one from 
Franklin's letter to Lord Karnes on 17th August, 1762. " I am now 
waiting here only for a wind to waft me to America, but cannot leave 
this happy island and my friends in it without extreme regret, though 
I am going to a country and a people that I love. I am going from the 
Old World to the New ; and I fancy I feel like those who are leaving 
this world for the next ; grief at the parting — fear of the passage- 
hope of the future." Sparks's Franklin, vol. i. p. 269. W» B. R. 



LITERATURE OF LETTER-WRITING. 



391 



Washington's in magnanimity. Unlike Washington, how- 
ever, in simplicity of character, he seemed impelled, by the 
fame he had gained as an orator, to carry a sort of oratori- 
cal ambition into all his ways of life : in a letter of advice to 
his nephew, he says, "Behaviour, though an external thing, 
which seems rather to belong to the body than to the 
mind, is certainly founded in considerable virtues."* It 
has been said of him that his very infirmities were ma- 
naged to the best advantage, and that in his hands even 
his crutch could become a weapon of oratory ) but that 
this striving for effect has helped to give to his private 
letters a forced and unnatural appearance — the style of 
homely texture, but here and there pieced with pompous 
epithets and swelling phrases. f The praise of a Roman 



* Chatham Correspondence, p. 77. 

f Lord Mahon's History, vol. iii. p. 20. As this volume is going 
through the press, I have received from London a little tract privately 
printed by Lord Mahon, called " Lord Chatham at Chevening, 1769/' 
Chevening is the seat of Earl Stanhope; and thither in 1769, in 
the absence of the owners on the Continent, came the valetudinarian 
statesman. This tract contains the letters of Mr. Brampton, the steward, 
describing to his mistress the demeanour of the guests : " The two young 
ladies in the yellow mohair room — Master William in the nursery." 
H Lord Chatham playing at billiards with the young gentlemen and la- 
dies, so long as to bring on the gout in his ankle," &g. &g. It would 
seem from the tract that the poor steward had some trouble from the 
Earl's changeableness, and that though but a guest, he acted (as on other 
occasions he was apt to do) very much like an imperious master. 

I confess a strong admiration for Lord Chatham, with all his infirm- 
ities ; themselves palliated by what is now conceded, his occasional in- 
tellectual prostration. Horace Walpole, whose letters are read by every- 
body, and who had good hereditary cause to hate him, has damaged 
his fame with studious posterity ; and yet where is there a nobler tri- 
bute to an English statesman than in one sentence of Walpole, in a 
letter to Mason, written when Chatham was in nis grave ? — " The Admi- 



892 



LECTURE TWELFTH. 



spirit, in the best sense of that term, has often been justly 
claimed for Pitt; and when writing to his wife, he says to 
Lady Chatham, " Be of cheer, noble love!" it sounds 
like Coriolanus speaking to the sister of Poplicola, or 
Brutus to his wife, the daughter of Cato. If the Chatham 
correspondence — both in the public and private letters — is 
distinguished by this stateliness of style, it is no less so 
by a loftiness of feeling and by the large thoughts of 
genuine statesmanship. 

If Lord Chatham's oratory transgressed into his letters, 
the reverse may be observed in a living British statesman, 
more illustrious as a soldier. That simple and somewhat 
peremptory sententiousness which marks the Duke of 
Wellington's writings, whether an important public de- 
spatch or a private note, is also the tone of his parlia- 
mentary speeches. Whether writing or speaking, he 
uses words with a stern frugality, and sends them straight 
to their mark. Trained by the discipline of camp to 
know and feel the mischief of a waste of words, he has 
gained, through long service as a soldier and a statesman, 
a soldierly command of the language, producing a prac- 
tical species of eloquence, wherein the most serviceable 
words are marshalled in compact and effective order. It 
is now near fifty years since, in his camp in India, he 
said that, when business could be done verbally, corre- 
spondence should be forbidden, to save the time of officers 
in perusing, considering, and copying voluminous docu- 
ments about nothing; and, as commander-in-chief, he 



ral has relieved Gibraltar. The Spanish fleet ran into their burrows, 
ue if Lord Chatham was alive" Letters to Mason, vol. ii. p. 179. 



LITERATURE OF LETTER- WRITING, 



393 



said, " If officers abroad will have no mercy upon each 
other in correspondence, ... I entreat them to have some 
upon me ; to confine themselves to the strict facts of the 
case, and to write no more than is necessary for the elu- 
cidation of their meaning and intentions." On another 
occasion, he quietly suggests how writing may be a dan- 
gerous qualification : " A very trifling degree of educa- 
cation and practice," he remarks, u will enable an officer 
to string together a few words in a letter ; . . , but this 
ability is a most dangerous qualification to the possessor, 
unless he has sense to guide his pen, and discretion to 
restrain him from the use of intemperate and improper 
language."* 

The voluminous publication of Wellington's letters in- 
cludes only, it must be remembered, his military corre- 
spondence; and whatever subjects it treats of are either 
subjects of warfare, or are looked at from a military point 
of view. Indeed, that soldierly vision had become, in a 
great measure, habitual, aud may be discerned in his civic 
career. You have probably heard the story that is told 
of him, that, when it was represented to him, as constable 
of the Tower of London, some valuable national archives 
were deposited very near the magazine, he replied thai 
they could not be of any damage to the saltpetre. 
Thus there is a ready explanation of a letter to his 
adjutant-general during the Peninsular War, the subject 
of which has rather a quaint sound, when briefly ana- 
lyzed in an index, with the title, "Singing of psalms in 
the abstract innocent." Military discipline is, of course, 
a general's first thought and duty, and accordingly he 



* Selections from Gurwood, p. 429. 



LECTUP.E TWELFTH. 



says, ( The meeting of soldiers in their cantonments to 
sing psalms or hear a sermon read by one of their com- 
rades; is ; in the abstract; perfectly innocent; and it is a 
better way of spending their time than many others to 
which they are addicted ; but it may become otherwise : 
and yet, till the abuse has made some progress, the com- 
manding officer would have no knowledge of it, nor could 
he interfere. Even, at last, his interference must be 
guided by discretion, otherwise he will do more harm 
than good ; and it can in no case be so effectual as that 
of a respectable clergyman. I wish, therefore, you 
would turn your mind a little more to this subject, and 
arrange some plan by which the number of respectable 
and efficient clergymen with the army may be in- 
creased. *f* 

Like Washington's, the letters of Wellington display 
the same solicitude for not only the discipline, but the 
well-being of his soldiers — the same thoughtfulness of 
details, coupled with the genius for planning and execut- 
ing large operations. There is a pervading good sense, 
(to call it by the humblest name,) whether the subject of 
the letter be the use of currycombs or hair-brushes for the 
horses, the stern repression of plunder, the respectful 
control of impracticable allies, or the report of a great 
battle. In the despatches to his government, after his 
victories, there is always a genuine soldierly modesty. 
After the victory at Salamanca, he begins a letter to Earl 
Bathurst : "I hope that you will be pleased with our 
battle, of which the despatch contains as accurate an ac- 



* Gurwood, vol. vii. p. 231. The odd entry in the Index is to be 
found in the volume of Selections, published in 1851. W. B. R. 



LITERATURE OF LETTER- WRITING. 



395 



count as I can give you. There was no mistake ; every 
thing went on as it ought."* 

One other characteristic of these letters has been thus 
eoniinented on by one of the authors of the " Guesses at 
Truth " Among the heroic features in the character 
of our great commander, none, except that sense of duty 
which in him is ever foremost, and throws all things else 
into the shade, is grander than the sorrow for his com- 
panions who have fallen, which seems almost to overpower 
every other feeling, even in the flush of victory. The 
conqueror of Bonaparte at Waterloo wrote on the day 
after, the 19th of June, to the Duke of Beaufort : c The 
losses we have sustained have quite broken me down ; 
and I have no feeling for the advantages we have ac- 
quired. ' On the same day, too, he wrote to Lord Aber- 
deen : 6 1 cannot express to you the regret and sorrow 
with which I look round me and contemplate the loss 
I have sustained, particularly in your brother. The glory 



* Letter of July 24, 1812. Selections, p. 614. There is a passage 
in one of Lord Wellington's letters from India which I am tempted to 
quote as (so it seems to me) the concentration of practical wisdom. 
It embodies good counsel for others besides soldiers : " I wish to draw 
your attention to the secresy of your proceedings. There is nothing 
more certain than that, out of one hundred affairs, ninety-nine might 
be posted up at the market-cross without injury to the public 
service ; but the misfortune is that, when public business is the sub- 
ject of general conversation, and is not kept secret as a matter of 
course upon every occasion, it is very difficult to keep it a secret upon 
that occasion when it is necessary. There is an awkwardness in a 
secret which enables discerning men (of which description there are 
always plenty in an army) invariably to find it out; and it may be 
depended upon, that, whenever the public service ought to be kept 
secret, it always suffers when it is exposed to public view. 1 ' Letter of 
June 28, 1804. Selections, p, 177. W. B, K 



oS6 



LECTUKE TWELFTH. 



resulting from such actions, so dearly bought, is no con- 
solation to me, and I cannot suggest it as any to you 
and his friends; but I hope that it may be expected that 
this last one has been so decisive as that no doubt remains 
that our exertions and our individual losses will be re- 
warded by the early attainment of our just object. It is 
then that the glory of the actions in which our friends 
have fallen will be some consolation for their loss/ He 
who could write thus had already gained a greater victory 
than that of Waterloo, and the less naturally follows the 
greater"* 

An example of the same fine spirit of humanity, of 
true soldierly gentleness of feeling, will no doubt readily 
recur to many minds in the letter of condolence on the death 
of a gallant son addressed to an eminent American states- 
man by the victor of Buena Vista. As a part of mili- 
tary literature, the despatches of General Taylor may be 
spoken of as having received the stamp of history, espe- 
cially since death has set its seal upon the hero's charac- 
ter. They stand, unquestionably, among the most re- 
markable productions of the kind in the language, whe- 
ther considered simply as specimens of genuine and 
masterly use of English words, as military narratives, or 
as illustrations of character. They made the soldier, 
President of the United States. The battles might have 
been won, the campaigns completed ; but it was the way 
in which the story was told, and the character uncon- 



* Hare's Guesses at Truth, Second series, p. 191. There is to 
this letter a very characteristic aail business-like postscript about 
Colonel Gordon's horse. W. B. S. 



I 



LITERATURE OF LETTER-WRITING. 397 

sciously disclosed through that story, that gained the con- 
fidence and the heart of the nation.* 

I proceed to the second division of my lecture, to be 
more briefly disposed of, the subject of familiar letters — 
that correspondence which, like conversation, is held with 
the unreserved confidence of private life, and without a 
purpose of publication. It is worthy of notice that this 
did slowly and late take a place in English literature — a fact 
which, if reflected upon, is, in some measure, illustrative 
of the character of the race, and of some worthy traits 
in that character. There is a passage in the brief me- 
moir of the poet Cowley, written by his friend Dr. Sprat, 
and addressed to another friend, which has a bearing on 
this subject, and which has often been referred to with 
complaint. " There was," he says, " one kind of prose 
wherein Mr. Cowley was excellent ; and that is his letters 
to his private friends. In those he always expressed the 
native tenderness and innocent gayety of his mind. I 



* At this time (February, 1855) the world is studying with intense 
interest the despatches and other letters, public and private, from the 
new scene of blood in the Crimea. The Anglo-French alliance, cne 
might imagine, has had its influence on national style. For though 
the despatches of Lord Raglan and his generals have all the precision 
and business-like simplicity of his countrymen on such occasions, 
florid French despatch-writing, with phrases about " the sun of Aus- 
terlitz" and " conquering a peace," has nearly disappeared. It died with 
Marshal St. Arnaud at Alma; for General Canrobert writes with the pre- 
cision and directness of an Englishman. It is very curious, too, to ob- 
serve the indifference with which, in his letters to his government, he 
refers to topics which, twenty years ago, a Bonapartist could not think 
of without fury. In his despatch of 28th November to the Minister 
of War, speaking of the first onset of the Russians at Inkermann, he 
gays, " Lord Raglan tells me the firing was as severe as at any 
time at Waterloo !" W. B. R. 

34 



£08 



LECTUKE TWELFTH. 



think, sir, you and I have the greatest collection of this 
sort. But I know you agree with me that nothing of 
this sort should be published ; and herein you have 
always consented to approve of the modest judgment of 
our countrymen above the practice of some of our neigh- 
bours, and chiefly of the French. I make no manner of 
question but the English, at this time, are infinitely im- 
proved in this way above the skill of £ >rmer ages ; yet 
they have been always judiciously sparing in printing 
such composures, while some other witty nations have 
tired all their presses and readers with them. The truth 
is, the letters that pass between particular friends, if they 
are written as they ought to be, can scarce ever be fit to 
see the light. They should not consist of fulsome com- 
pliments, or tedious politics, or elaborate elegancies, or gene- 
ral fancies; but they should have a native clearness and 
shortness, a domestical plainness, and a peculiar kind of 
familiarity, which can only affect the humour of those for 
whom they were intended. The very same passages 
which make writings of this nature delightful among 
friends, will lose all manner of taste when they come to 
be read by those that are indifferent. In such letters, 
the souls of men should appear undressed ; and in that 
negligent habit they may be fit to be seen by one or two 
in a chamber, but not to go abroad in the street." 

This is, indeed, very tantalizing, especially so, for Cow- 
ley's delightful prose-essays have a savour of what must 
have made his familiar letters most excellent of their kind ; 
the passage described, indeed, the very perfection of such 
letters in the very reason given for withholding them. 
However one may dissent from the reasoning, and still 
mote regret the application of it, it is entitled to some 



LITERATURE OF LETTER-WRITING. 



S99 



respect as having a basis of sound sense, and expressive 
of a just feeling — that honourable spirit which is, I be- 
lieve, an element in the character of our race. It was so 
formerly, more so than now; for that u modest judg- 
ment," which the biographer of Cowley spoke of as re- 
straining the publication of private correspondence, has 
grown to be old-fashioned; and the barriers of reserve 
have been broken down by the cupidity of booksellers, 
the vanity of authors, and the vicious curiosity of readers. 
If this department of English literature has, in late 
years, received many and valuable additions, it has not 
been all clear gain : the sanctities of domestic life and 
the proprieties of official life have been violated ; the 
world has intruded where it had no title to enter, and 
often learned what it had far better remained ignorant 
of; the happy confidence of social communion has been 
startled in its security ; and the author can scarce 
write a familiar note without misgiving of future pub- 
lication. 

When Pope's correspondence was surreptitiously pub- 
lished by an unscrupulous bookseller, Dr. Arbuthnot 
wittily spoke of Curll, the publisher, as a new terror of 
death.* When the letters of Robert Burns were first 



* Dr. Johnson once remarked that the practice of publishing the 
letters of literary men had grown so common, that he made it a point, 
to put as little as possible in his own. There will be found in the 
London Quarterly Review, a few years back, an excellent essay on this 
subject in its relation to official life, on the subject of the posthumous 
publication of Lord Malmesbury's journals and letters. Our Ameri- 
can diplomatic subordinates have, of late years, committed the 
grosser scandal of scribbling for home newspapers. A greater 
indecorum, and one more detrimental to public interests, can hardly 
be conceived. W. B. R. 



400 LECTURE TWELFTH. 

given to the world, disclosing the deplorable frailties of 
his life- — not as a wise and feeling biographer might have 
done, but in the dark colours of the frenzy of genius, 
conscious of guilt and never wholly divorced from a soul 
of goodness — a fellow-poet, strong in the might of a life 
of irreproachable purity, and yet compassionate of his frail 
brother, protested in earnest prose against the world's right 
to penetrate into the privacy of an author's life. I refer 
to a pamphlet of Wordsworth's, in which, among other 
remarks, he observed that " The Life of Johnson by Bos- 
well had broken through many pre-existing delicacies, and 
afforded the British public an opportunity of acquiring 
experience, which before it had happily wanted. " A 
younger poet, Mr. Tennyson, has also made his protest 
against the growing evil, in some vigorous stanzas ad- 
dressed to a friend, and entitled "The Age of Trreve- 

u You might have won the poet's name, 
If such be worth the winning now, 
And gained a laurel for your brow, 
Of sounder leaf than I can claim. 

* But you have made the wiser choice ; 
A life that moves to gracious ends, 
Through troops of unrecording friends, 
A deedful life, a silent voice. 

And you have missed the irreverent doom 
Of those that wear the poet's crown ; 
Hereafter neither knave nor clown 

Shall hold their orgies at your tomb* 

For now the poet cannot die, 
Nor leave his music as of old, 
But round him, ere he scarce be cold, 

Begins the scandal and the cry : — 



LITERATURE 0E LETTER-WRITING. 



401 



' Give out the faults he would not show ! 

Break lock and seal ! betray the trust J 

Keep nothing sacred: 'tis but just 
The many-headed beast should know/ 

Ah, shameless ! for he did but sing 
A song that pleased us from its worth : 
No public life was his on earth, 

No blazoned statesman he, nor king. 

He gave the people of his best : 

His worst he kept, his best he gave. 

My curse upon the clown and knave 
Who will not let his ashes rest ! 

Who makes it sweeter seem to be, 

The little life of bank and brier, 

The bird that pipes his lone desire, 
And dies unheard within his tree, 

Than he that warbles long and loud, 
And drops at glory's temple-gates, 
For whom the carrion vulture waits, 
I To tear his heart before the crowd."* 

The volume which is ; I believe, the earliest collection 
of letters, is a singular exception to that old-fashioned 
English reserve which I have spoken of — the volume 



* On a kindred subject, that of the rash, posthumous publication 
of private diaries, or rather of the faithful performance of duty to the 
dead in their suppression, the reader is referred to the conduct of Lady 
Bute, the daughter of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, in the intro- 
ductory anecdotes prefixed to Lord WharnclifiVs edition, p. 21. I may 
here observe that nothing more clearly shows the popular and cursory 
character of these lectures, (and this was my brother's view of them,) 
than that among the poets he does not mention Thomson or Collins, or, 
among the letter-writers, Lady Mary Wortley Montague. W. B. R. 
34* 



402 



LECTURE TWELFTH. 



entitled u Familiar Letters, domestic and foreign, partly 
historical, political, and philosophical, by James Howell/' 
in the times of Charles the First, and published during 
the Protectorate. It is the case of a writer setting such 
esteem upon his own letters as to collect and give them to 
the world ; and although the volume is now a neglected 
and rather rare one, the welcome it had is proved by the fact 
that it went through eleven editions in a century. Howell 
was a traveller, on the continent and in England was in 
intercourse with men of various celebrity : while his let- 
ters show much curious matter, one cannot help thinking 
how high a value such a correspondence might have had, 
if it had given the thoughts of a stronger mind in that 
momentous period. The Paston Letters, though of much 
earlier date, were not published until the latter part of 
the eighteenth century, about three hundred years after 
they were written. It is the correspondence of the Pas- 
ton family during the era of the wars of York and Lan- 
caster, comprehending a curious variety of epistles, from 
the note of an Eton scholar, with thanks for a box of 
raisins and figs, to letters following the sad fortunes of 
that simple and saintly sovereign, Henry the Sixth, and 
his heroic queen. When these letters were brought to 
light, after their long sleep, they had a congenial welcome 
from Horace Walpole, who said, " The letters of Henry 
the Sixth's reign are come out, and to me make all other 
letters not worth reading. I have gone through above 
one volume, and cannot bear to be writing when I am so 
eager to be reading."* 

A very pathetic interest attaches to the collection of 



* Letters t@ Lady Ossory, vol, ii. p. 297. 



LITERATURE OF LETTER-WRITING. 



403 



the Letters of Lady Russel, the memory of her husband's 
tragic death on the scaffold casting a solemn light over 
the whole correspondence during a widowhood protracted 
to extreme old age, and distinguished no less by profound 
affection to her departed husband than by a widowed 
mother's untiring duty to her children. Her's was a life 
of genuine womanly heroism, a life with one awful sorrow 
in its centre, sustained, if not cheered, by thoughtful 
Christian piety. The correspondence is the unconscious 
portraiture of such a character, in which were combined 
the spirit of submission to affliction and an energetic for- 
titude that shrank from no duty. There is, perhaps, no 
more touching incident in British annals than that one so 
well-known on the trial of her husband for treason, when 
Lord Russel asked, " May I have somebody to write 
to help my memory ?" The attorney-general answered, 
"Yes, a servant." The noble prisoner said, " My wife 
is here." The harshness of the chief justice (Pember- 
ton) was softened, when, recognising Lady Russel's pre- 
sence, he added, " If my lady please to give herself the 
trouble." 

It is a transition from letters of the most intense and 
serious reality to a correspondence the most superficial in 
feeling and the most artificial in expression, to pass to the 
letters of Pope; another instance, like Howell's, of the 
letter-writer making of his letters to his intimates a book 
for everybody. They were modelled after the French 
epistolary school of Balzac and Voiture, (before the talent 
of Madame de Sevigne had given an attractive graceful- 
ness to French letters,) and vitiated by the ambition, bad 
enough in any use of speech or writing, but odious, in a 
familiar letter — the ambition of fine thoughts in fine words. 



404 



LECTURE TWELFTH. 



Even Mr. Hallam's calm judgment stops not at calling 
Pope "the ape of Voiture" in his letters to ladies.* And 
one who so admirably conceived and executed the true 
idea of a familiar letter, as Cowper did, in shrinking from 
that applause of his correspondence which Pope was ever 
coveting, said a " foolish vanity would have spoiled me 
quite, and made me as disgusting a letter-writer as Pope, 
who seems to have thought that unless a sentence was 
well turned, and every period pointed with some conceit, 
it was not worth the carriage. Accordingly, he is to me, 
except in very few instances, the most disagreeable maker 
of epistles that ever I met with. I was willing, therefore, 
to wait till the impression your commendation had made 
upon the foolish part of me was worn off, that I might 
scribble away as usual, and write my uppermost thoughts 
and those only."f * 

Of that society identified with Pope's letters, it was 
well said by the late Hartley Coleridge, "Never was 
literary band so closely united by harmonious dis- 
similitude as that which comprised Swift, Pope, Gay, 
Arbuthnot, and Parnell : they were a perfect co-operative 
society, and might be said, almost without a metaphor, to 
feel for each other. But Swift thought for them all : his 
was the informing mind, and exercised over his associates 
that supremacy which philosophic power, however per- 
verted, will always maintain over mere genius, though 
elegant as Pope's — over simple erudition, though extensive 
as Arbuthnot' s., Moreover, whenever a limited number 
of men form a league or union, it is ten to one that the 



* Literature of Europe, vol. iii. p. 641. 
•j- bonthey's Cowper, vol. iv. p. 15, 



LITERATURE OF LETTER-WRITING. 



405 



least amiable will be the most influential."* Swift's 
masculine power is manifest in his letters, for affectation, 
unless the affectation of rudeness, came not nigh him . 
there is, too, in his letters, a sad reality, from the connec- 
tion with that strange control which his stern nature 
gained over the affections of two women at the same time ; 
his mysterious marriage with one, and the final heart- 
breaking of them both. Whenever a letter of Bishop 
Berkeley's appears, it shows him always the pure, the 
gentle, and the virtuous, the gentleman and the divine, 
the most beautiful character of that generation, the moral 
footprints of whose life are to this day visible on American 
soil.f 

The letters of Lord Chesterfield are a remarkable 
instance of celebrity gained unintentionally, and super- 
seding, in a great measure, other grounds of reputation. 
For one person acquainted with his character as a states- 
man, at home and in diplomacy, the rare ability displayed 
as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in the administration of 
that most unmanageable section of the British empire, 
and the tradition of his oratory, twenty know of his letters 
to his son, written in perfect parental confidence, and 
published years afterwards surreptitiously. I cannot bet- 
ter or more briefly characterize the letters, than by saying 
that they make a book of the minor moralities and the 
major immoralities of life. They profess to dehl with 
nothing higher than those secondary motives which, 



* Hartley Coleridge's Biographia Borealis, p. 115. Note to Life of 
Bentley. 

f No one that heard them will ever forget Mr. Thackeray's brilliarr 
criticism on Pope's letters, and his sketches of the society, heartless 
may bo, but very fascinating, which they illustrate. W. B. R. 
2 A 



406 



LECTURE TWELF'IIL 



though poor and even dangerous substitutes for moral 
principle., are yet not to be despised in the formation of 
character — considerations of expediency, reputation, per- 
sonal advantage ; and being addressed to a youth of un- 
couth manners, they laid that stress upon grace of deport- 
ment which has given to the name of Chesterfield a pro- 
verbial use. The letters embody a great deal of sound 
advice, the result of the large worldly experience of an 
acute and cultivated nobleman, too acute not to know at 
least the impolicy of much of the world's wickedness. 
When they were published, Dr. Johnson pronounced a 
pithy and coarse sentence of condemnation, which may 
recur to the minds of some of my hearers, who will recog- 
nise my restraint in not repeating it. He afterwards 
modified his censure, and said, " Take out the immorality, 
and the book ought to be in the hands of every young 
gentleman."* 

It is to another man of the world of Chesterfield's 
times, and the times of a great many other people, that 
English literature owes its most voluminous, and, in some 
respects, most remarkable collection of letters— I need 
hardly say, I refer to Horace Walpole. His letters count 
by thousands : about three thousand are in print, and the 
publication of more is looked for. In one of Scribe's 
vaudevilles, Madame de Sevigne is described as the lady 



* The notes to this lecture have been too far multiplied to allow me 
room for admiration, as a matter of rhetoric, of Lord Chesterfield. I 
have often thought that a biography of British statesmen by an Ame- 
rican, and from an American point of view, would be a most useful and 
delightful book, and on Us pages no one would appear more brightly 
than Lord Chesterfield, The English of his letters, not written for 
publication, but in the strictest confidence > is matchless. W. B, R, 



LITERATURE OF LETTER - WRITING-. 



407 



who used to write letters all the while. Horace Walpole 
takes the palm ; and has been styled the prince of letter- 
writers, a title well-earned by the continuity of his labours, 
or rather his pleasures, in this department of composition 
during a long life. His letters cover a period of more 
than threescore years, beginning in 1735, and ending in 
1797, a few weeks before his death; thus touching at one 
end the times of George the Second, and the Pretenders, 
and Maria Theresa, and at the other the French Revolu- 
tion and Republic. With Walpole's large political and 
social opportunities, his letters are full of the history, and 
fuller of the gossip, of sixty years — pleasant reading, but 
uncertain authority. A shrewd, but sometimes malevo- 
lent commentator on his fellow-men, a witty observer of 
manners, he sought amusement in the fopperies of a fan- 
tastic country mansion and the luxury of a private print- 
ing-press, but his happiness, rather, I think, in the luxu- 
rious indulgence of perpetual letter-writing to correspond- 
ents of both sexes and various ages; and twelve octavo 
volumes, with an indefinite series in prospect, are the 
record of this indulgence. An elegant sefishness, tem- 
pered with much kindly feeling for his friends, is undis- 
guised in his letters ; and a self-indulgent frivolity deepens 
into earnestness only in a fervid indignation, which he 
was one of the first to utter against the African slave- 
trade, and when, near the close of life, his imperturbable 
voluptuousness was startled by the atrocities of the French 
Revolution. The letters, faithful to the last, bring their 
story very near to the old man's death — the melancholy 
conclusion of eighty years of worldliness. It is in his last 
letter but one to Lady Ossory, that he describes himself as 
a sort of Methuselah, whom fourscore nephews and nieces 



LECTURE TWELFTH. 



were annually brought to stare at. The title of Earl of 
Orford came too late to be welcome ; he never took his 
place in the House of Lords, and even evaded the dignity 
by either signing himself "uncle of the late Earl of 
Orford," or simply with a capital 0, almost as if, with 
something of bitter self-satire, he meant by the cipher to 
symbolize the nothingness of his state of being.* 

To turn from Walpole's letters to those of his once 
friend and travelling companion, the poet Gray, is like 
passing from the throng of the world of politics or fashion 
into the calm and cloistered seclusion of a college. That 
seclusion was connected with both the virtues and the 
weaknesses of Gray's character, his purity, his gentleness, 
his studious love of books, and with his dainty and almost 
effeminate shrinking, not only from active life, but even 
from the publicity of authorship, and social intercourse 
with mankind or womankind. Cowper said, "I once 
thought Swift's letters the best that could be written, 
but I like Gray's better. His humour, or his wit, or 
whatever it is to be called, is never ill-natured or offen- 
sive, and yet, I think, equally poignant with the Dean/s."f 



* The letters to Lady Ossory are certainly marked by a superior 
tone of seriousness and dignity, and no solemn moralist can write more 
genuine words of honest self-reproach, than Walpole did when he said, 
"When young, I wished for fame, not examining whether I was 
capable of attaining it, nor considering in what light fame was desi- 
rable. There are two parts of honest fame; that attendant on the 
truly great, and that better sort which is due to the good. I fear I did 
not aim at the latter, nor discover, till too late, that I could not com- 
pass the former. Having neglected the best road, and having, instead 
of the other, strolled into a narrow path that led to no goal worth seek- 
ing, I see the idleness of my journey." W. B. R. 

t Southey's Cowper, vol* iv. p. 15. 



LITERATURE OF LETTER-WRITING. 



409 



The letters on which I should have been glad to have 
dwelt the most I must dispose of briefly — Cowper's own ; 
and I can do so the more safely, in speaking of them as 
the purest and most perfect specimens of familiar letters 
in the language. Considering the secluded, uneventful 
course of Cowper's life, the charm in his letters is won- 
derful ; and is to be explained, I believe, chiefly by the 
exquisite light of poetic truth which his imagination shed 
upon daily life, whether his theme was man, himself or a 
fellow-being, or books, or the mute creation which he 
loved to handle with such thoughtful tenderness. His 
seclusion did not separate him from sympathy with the 
stirring events of his time ; and, alike in seasons of sun- 
shine or of gloom, there is in his letters an ever-present 
beauty of quiet wisdom, and a gentle but fervid spirit. 
There is, I believe, no long collection of letters which 
can be continuously read with the same sustained interest, 
following the writer through cheerfulness and despondency 
into the cloud, from which he sent forth some words of 
sadness as it mysteriously closed over him. 

The letters of Sir Walter Scott, in Mr. Lockhart's in- 
imitable biography, claim the same high praise. There 
is the same excellent adaptation of the letter to the occa- 
sion and to the party addressed, which is essential in a 
true letter. There is also the same power of so expressing 
the writer's feelings as to move in sympathy with the 
correspondent, and for the correspondent's pleasure, with- 
out ever sinking into egotism or vanity. It is this — the 
mastery of the subjective character of the composition, 
which is at once the difficulty and virtue of the real fa- 
miliar letter. A child, in its innocence and unreflective- 
ness, toils at so putting its heart into words ; and there 

35 



410 



LECTURE TWELFTH. 



are those who carry into mature life so much of child- 
like simplicity of character as to be unfit for letter- 
writing. The more common fault is, however, in the other 
direction — a gross or insidious egotism. Scott's style 
of correspondence has a very high merit in combining a 
frank expression of his own feelings along with a perpe- 
tual mindfulness of the feelings of those to whom he 
writes. 

The letters of Lord Byron displaying, even more than 
his poems, his command of vigorous English speech — 
make a perilous display of a morbid egotism, redeemed, 
indeed, at times, by flashes of kindly feeling, of generous 
impulse, and healthy opinion, so as to perplex the reader's 
judgment, or, at least, to plead for his pity to the misery 
of a soul distempered by nature, and far worse by a life 
of moral lawlessness ; and by that pride which, tempting 
him often to brave the world's opinion by even affecting 
worse thoughts and worse deeds than were imputed to 
him, was fatal to the truthfulness of his character and of 
his writings. 

Of Southey's letters, interwoven with his biography, 
just completed, it is too soon to speak otherwise than 
with a general allusion to the interest of them, without 
attempting to measure their merits and their faults. 

Charles Lamb's letters resemble his inimitable essays — 
a quaint wisdom, a fine literary taste, and a loving and 
a brave heart dwelling together in that humour which 
was his peculiar gift. 

Letters of dedication may be merely mentioned in 
connection with this general subject. The early dedi- 
cations abound in noble feeling, fitly expressed, with 
an eloquence that is midway between oratory and the 



LITERATURE OF LETTER-WRITING. 



familiarity of a letter. There followed a long period 
during which they were vitiated by fulsome and ser- 
vile flattery. Of late years, truth has been restored on 
the dedication page ; and many a one, in verse as well as 
.prose, is a record of a genuine feeling of reverence, of 
admiration, and of love. Let me refer to one for the sake 
of a thought I wish (in conclusion) to leave in your 
minds. Charles Lamb dedicated his earliest volume to 
his sister — that afflicted sister to whom he devoted all 
his days. He consulted Coleridge in a letter in which 
he said, " I have another sort of dedication in my head 
for my few things, which I want to know if you approve 
of. I mean to inscribe them to my sister. It will be 
unexpected, and it will give her pleasure ; or do you 
think it will look whimsical at all ? . . . There is a mo- 
notony in the affections, which people living together (or, 
as we do now, very frequently seeing each other) are apt 
to give into ; a sort of indifference in the expression of 
kindness for each other, which demands that we should 
sometimes call to our aid the trickery of surprise."* 

* These last words have suggested to me a dedication of this 
volume which I had not before designed. In parting with it, it 
seemed natural and congenial with my feelings to the dead to add 
a tribute, most deserved and unexpected, to the living. W. B. R. 



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